The Twilight Man: Blood Obligation (JJBA)

[Leila Hann]

Where The Wild Roses Grow

 

[Leila Hann]

4. Night and Day​

By the time they made it back to Ogre Street, Jonathan’s hand had gone completely numb, and the punctures in his arm, waist, and shoulders had turned their impromptu bandages into wrinkled matts of frozen blood. Still, he was walking more sturdily than Speedwagon, whose breathing was still slightly laborious, and who still massaged the ring of bruises around his neck every few minutes.

Gabriel’s wounds seemed to have just vanished, leaving only the rips in his cloak to indicate that he had ever been stuck full of flechettes. For some reason, Jonathan wasn’t surprised.

“Where did you disappear to?” Speedwagon asked Gabriel, his voice quieter and raspier than usual as they walked across an early morning snow that hadn’t yet been dirtied by the daily activities. “When Jonathan and I were treating his wounds?”

“Treating my own,” Gabriel said without making eye contact. He walked well to the side of them, keeping himself in the shadows of the eastward buildings. His face was downturned, and his hood drawn forward as far as it could be.

“Why’d you go away to do it?”

They reached the doorstep of Clara Speedwagon’s Respectable Establishment. The windows were dark and the curtains drawn. Gabriel gestured for Speedwagon to lead the way to the door, and said “I had to find a cat.”

Speedwagon’s bushy eyebrows shot upward, and his mouth started to open again. Jonathan put his good hand on his arm, and just silently shook his head. Speedwagon looked at him, and then back at Gabriel, before letting out a resigned sigh and shaking his own head back. Finally, he stepped in front of them and knocked a particular rhythm on the door. There were footsteps from inside, and a moment later it opened. A young woman with tangled brown hair and sleepy bags under her eyes stood behind it, dressed in a set of drab and faded pajamas. It was only when she spoke that Jonathan recognized her as Cecily.

“You’re back,” she said, sounding relieved even if she was still blinking the sleep out of her ruddy eyes, “I…oh Lord, you’re all bloody! And…Robert, your neck!”

Speedwagon shook his head, forcing his scarred face to smile. “Just bruises, Ces, Mr. Joestar is the one as needs doctoring. Is Clara awake?”

At that moment, the sound of a baby crying echoed from the back room, followed by a soothing, motherly voice saying “Oh, please my little angel, will you please go the fuck back to sleep?” Cecily just grimaced. Speedwagon tipped his bowler and led Jonathan and Gabriel inside. “I’ll fetch a basin for our cloaks, before they melt and ruin the carpeting. She threw a right fit the last time Tattoo and I tracked blood in here, she did. In the meantime, can you fetch her?”

“Y…yes, of course.” Cecily turned and started walking toward the back door. Before reaching it though, she stopped and turned back around.

“That blood though…and you being alive. You really got him, then?”

Speedwagon nodded before disappearing into the walk-in closet across the room.

“And Eliza?” She looked at the other two, a ray of hope piercing through the tiredness and shock.

When he saw that Gabriel wasn’t saying anything, Jonathan just bowed his head and put his non-bandaged hand on his heart. “I’m sorry, miss.”

Cecily stared at him, and then clamped her jaws tightly shut. She blinked, nodded very slightly and slowly, and then disappeared into the back room to get Clara. Robert came back with a wicker laundry basket, and motioned frantically for the other two to throw their ragged and blood-frozen overcoats into it. In back, female voices spoke irritably at each other beneath the cries of the baby.

“I’ll have to leave on the bandages,” Jonathan said, as much to himself as to Speedwagon, “on my hand especially. Although, if you have any clean…”

He looked up at Speedwagon, and saw the man staring at something, looking almost disbelieving. Jonathan followed his gaze, which led him to Gabriel. His wounds were indeed almost completely healed; his back, when Jonathan saw it as Gabriel dropped his tattered cloak into the basket, was peppered with only some faint wrinkles or marks where less than an hour ago blades had been planted, and even those appeared to still be healing. Even more striking, however, was what had been concealed until now beneath his thick cloak. Every bit of him, from the base of his tree trunk like neck to his incongruously drab and commonplace boots, was bulging with what looked less like muscles and more like densely knotted steel cables, just barely concealed under his olive skin. He wore only a tiny, sleeveless shirt of dark purple wool that barely covered his upper chest and shoulders, and an elaborately folded yellow silk thing around his waist and loins. The blue cloth, bronze chains and circlet, and ivory barb of his headdress gave him the quality of a living statue; along with his golden lip and earrings and the curling blue mark over his cheek and forehead, it made him look a pagan monument bedecked with jeweled tithe.

“Wow,” Speedwagon whispered. Jonathan just looked carefully at the shape of the tiny shirt and the subtly ribboned edges of the intricately wrapped loincloth, and then up at the headdress that he’d already seen. There was something familiar, in this shockingly minimal costume, but not from anyone he had met or even seen himself. When he tried to remember where he had seen this before, all he could think of were illustrations copied from a New World ruin that had been ancient when Christ was yet unborn. He was about to ask a question when the door opened again and Clara entered. From behind her, the sound of the baby’s cries had stopped, but in its place was the quieter sobbing of a young woman.

“What happened, then?” Clara asked. She looked frazzled in the same way as Cecily, her pale blonde hair long and disheveled around her chest and back, but she kept her face and voice both calm. Her expression changed when she noticed Gabriel, however; mouth remaining slightly open as one heavy eyebrow slowly climbed upward.

“The man you called Jack the Ripper is dead,” Gabriel said, either not noticing how everyone was staring at him or just not showing it. “Remain careful working on the streets at night. There may still be others like him on this island.”

She nodded, looking even more confused then before, but then noticed the marks around her brother’s neck.

“Robbie, are you!?” She exclaimed, just barely keeping herself from shouting and waking her infant again, as she rushed forward and put a hand on his chin and another on his undershirted shoulder. “You’ve been…”

“I’ve been worse, you know well enough yourself.” He rolled his eyes and pushed her hand away. “Still, might be taking a day or two easy.” He opened his arms and hugged her, and she returned the gesture. Once again, Jonathan felt that faint twinge of alienation. Perhaps even envy.

“We’ve got Mr. Joestar here to thank that I’m not much worse,” Robert said as the two released each other. “The monster of a man had me by the neck like a noose.” He turned back to Jonathan, and gave him an earnest expression with his wide, light brown eyes. It was similar to the face he’d made at him back at home, when he let him keep the cufflinks and candlestick, but moreso, and with something else to it that Jonathan wasn’t sure he could quite parse.

“Did you?” Clara turned toward Jonathan herself, eyes quickly going to his bandages and becoming concerned.

Gabriel answered before Jonathan could. “Yes.”

Clara bowed her head slightly at Jonathan. “Well. I suppose the least we can do is get you to the hospital. I’ll get some fresh bandages and then we should start moving!”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Jonathan tried to move his right fingers a little beneath the bloodied cloth, but stopped when agony lit up inside his punctured fingers. At least one of them wasn’t moving at all. He’d been too shocked to think much about his injuries, after seeing what he had, but now he was beginning to realize that he might have only four fingers on his right hand for the rest of his life. Maybe only three. Archaeology might be harder. Not to mention rugby. His heart froze as further implications set in. And writing.

He forced those thoughts away and took a deep breath. He’d always healed remarkably well, and infections were rare for him even when he’d been hurt. Perhaps he’d keep his digits in the end. But the index finger that wasn’t moving at all…the nail that had unmistakably come out of a fingerbone…

“There is something else to try first,” Gabriel suddenly said.

All eyes were back on the nearly naked, bronze and ivory-crowned giant.

“Before you use your traditional medicine, I would like your permission to try something else. There is a risk that it might injure you further, but I think it is more likely to help your body recover.”

Jonathan turned slowly around, facing Gabriel warily. Somehow, seeing him in this dress, with those machine-like muscles bulging almost inhumanly out of his skin, was just the perfect capstone for everything else he’d seen the man do up until now. The chains. The winds. The strength, and the nonchalance with which he’d used it to crush Aaron’s head and chest. The healing. The cat, whatever the hell he had supposedly done with it.

“What are you?”

Gabriel shook his head, setting the chains jangling a little against his head and neck. “You should be in better health before we discuss that.” He turned his massive, coppery body around and looked past the Speedwagon siblings toward the windows. “And in a more secure location.”

“I don’t care, Mr. Wamuu.”

Gabriel turned back around at Jonathan, as did Robert and Clara. Jonathan knew the pain was getting to him, but he didn’t regret his tone of voice even if that had been a factor in it.

“You told me I’d learn everything about the mask if I came with you tonight. You’ve shown me what it can do, yes, but that’s not nearly all that was promised. I’ve held up my end of our bargain, and likely lost at least one finger for it. Before I let you do anything else, you’re going to need to hold up yours.”

Gabriel’s face went cold and serious. Jonathan was vaguely aware of the others taking a step away, but he didn’t move. He kept his eyes locked on the foreigner’s.

Then, Gabriel smiled. It was very brief, but surprisingly earnest.

“You are right. My honor demands as much.”

Jonathan nodded. His shoulders relaxed again.

“You would still get more out of anything I said if you were in better health. I will answer your question. Then, you will let me try what I offered. Whether or not it succeeds, I will then tell you everything I know about the masks and their origins myself.”

“Assuming he doesn’t die from your little experiment, that is!” Speedwagon suddenly cut in, stepping around Gabriel’s bulk to half-interpose himself between him and Jonathan.

Gabriel cocked his head a little, a hint of a more sardonic smile on his lips. “You too, Speedwagon?”

Speedwagon shrugged and held up his hands helplessly. “You might’ve spared my life, but Jonathan saved it, and went well out of his way to do it. I ‘aven’t got any real choice who to side with, do I? Especially as I was witness to your promise.”

“Robbie,” Clara asked, giving her brother a cautious, almost worried, look, “what exactly are you lot on about?”

Gabriel hesitated. Seconds ticked by, and then a full minute.

“There is a reason the answers to your questions are not already known to all,” Gabriel finally told Jonathan, “telling you them will change your life forever. Most likely for the worse.” He took a step back so he could face all three of the others at once. “I will provide them to Jonathan and one other, in private. If think it should be you, Robert. You do not have any children to look after.”

Clara’s eyebrows shot up. “What? Robbie, why not just let these two gentlemen talk among themselves. We’ve got more than enough to worry about already.”

Speedwagon, however, shook his head at her. “Not a chance. After what I saw, I think there’s no way to properly unconnect me from all this anyway. To be honest, I think someone else ought to be on hand in case you kill Jonathan with your little experiment as well.”

Gabriel chuckled, and gave Speedwagon an approving smile. “Even if it fails, it will not kill him. Not with bones and lungs like his.” Jonathan put his good hand to his chest, even less sure about this now than he’d been a moment ago. “But you have fought alongside us, and I want to keep you close. Madam, is there a room where we will not be overheard?”

“Well.” Clara gave her brother one last anxious gaze. “Eliza’s old room is empty, and up on the second floor away from the street. Just keep it down, and them in the rooms next door should sleep through it.”

Gabriel nodded, satisfied. Robert stepped up to the back door. “Right-o then. Come on, we need to hear this and then get Jonathan some treatment before we all pass right out for want of sleep.” Jonathan thought about assuring him that he tended to do this anyway, but truth be told he actually was getting tired at this point. Instead, he silently followed the other two through the back room, and then up a rickety wooden staircase that Gabriel had to duck to not hit his head in. At the top of it, Speedwagon opened one of several doors and ushered them into a small, unlit bedchamber with rosy pink drapes blocking the feeble, early morning sunlight from the window, and matching covers spread, pristinely, across the bed. Once the other two had entered, he closed it behind them and stood before it, eyes on Gabriel as if making sure he didn’t try to escape.

“Among ourselves,” Gabriel said, standing in the middle of the room and staring almost warily at the covered window, “we are just ‘people.’ There have been names for us in some of your languages, but most of them are not spoken any more. We call you daymen, though, so to you we would probably be nightmen.”

“Nightmen.” Jonathan repeated. He wasn’t sure if he was confused, or disappointed. By the door, Speedwagon looked almost outraged. “That’s it? Just…night men?”

Gabriel repeated his sardonic near-smile. “The alternative is ‘people.’ Would that be any more satisfying?”

Jonathan, whose hand seemed to be hurting him more and more every minute that it was away from the numbing outdoor chill, made a point of clearing his throat. Speedwagon looked at him apologetically, and shut his mouth.

“I’m guessing you’re not really from Honduras,” Jonathan said.

“No. I was born in what you call central Mexico.” Speedwagon started looking outraged again, but Jonathan silenced him with a look. “Some say our people first came from the valley of the orchid river to the south, many thousands of years ago, when my great grandparents were not yet born. Others, that we crossed the ice far to the north, just like the first daymen in our homeland did. Some say we were always in the place my mother and fathers and I were born. I do not know which story is true. Just that we have been here as long as you have.” He looked away from the window, and toward Jonathan. “Before my time, our people knew some of the tribes of the nearby daymen, and they us. Much has changed since that time.”

“How long ago was that? Before your time?” Jonathan wasn’t sure if he was going to believe the answer, but he also knew he wouldn’t have a choice.

“I was born four thousand and seventy-five years ago, if that is what you meant.” When Speedwagon’s eyebrows shot upward again, he followed it up. “If I lived a less dangerous life, I could expect at least four thousand more, but unless I am either very lucky or very resourceful it will probably be much less.” He chuckled grimly. “We pay for our longevity and strength by only having one child for every thousand of yours, and that was at our height. Now it is probably closer to one nightman for every million daymen.”

“The carvings.” Jonathan pressed. “The ones you saw the sketches of, when you picked them off the floor. How many generations ago would those have been, for you?”

“I do not know that specific carving. Based on the subject matter, it was probably engraved when I was a young man.”

Jonathan didn’t say anything. What was there to even say to that? He knew there was much more to ask, but between exhaustion, pain, and the ineffable concept of being in the presence of a man who had been alive when some of the oldest artifacts in the Mesoamerican record were crafted, a man whose existence rendered Jonathan’s entire field of study a farce? The new world he had fallen into, the London below the London below the London he once thought he knew, was closing its jaws behind him. Locking comfort and sanity away, or just destroying them. Perhaps I’ve been dreaming the entire last few days. Perhaps I’m in a madhouse right now, kicking against the walls. The burning pain in his knuckles, however, was far too vivid to be a phantom of dreams or madness.

“Mister Wamuu,” Speedwagon said, “and Mister Joestar? I think perhaps we ought to try that healing thing now?”

Jonathan looked over at Speedwagon, to see that he was eyeing him with deep concern. How pale must I be?

“Just Wamuu, actually. Nightmen do not keep family names. Gabriel was a nickname a Spaniard gave me.” Jonathan briefly wondered if he should ask how long ago that was supposed to have happened, but he didn’t. “Do you agree to try this, Jonathan?”

Jonathan let out a long, slow breath and looked down at his hand. The bandage was soaked through completely, and beginning to drip on the floor. “Well,” he said softly, “I don’t think anything you do is going to leave me worse off than where I am now.”

“Sit down on the bed,” Wamuu directed him. “Speedwagon, come here. I will need you to do exactly as I say.”

Jonathan sat down, silently hoping that the wound in his side wasn’t dripping as much blood on the covers as his hand was likely about to. Speedwagon stood beside him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Alright, what do I do then?”

“For now,” Wamuu said, “hold him tighter and do not let go.” As Speedwagon’s grip tightened on his ample shoulder, Wamuu looked down into Jonathan’s eyes. “Take in a deep breath, and hold it.”

Jonathan did as he was instructed, filling his lungs with the cold and dusty air with its faint undertaste of coal smoke and sewage.

“Breathe out all the way. Press all the air from your lungs, and breathe back in the same way.”

Nodding slightly, Jonathan did as he was told, contracting his chest and holding it in until he was sure there was almost nothing in his lungs, and then puffing it out again.

“Breathe out again.”

Jonathan obeyed, and as soon as his chest had fully contracted Wamuu stabbed him in the diaphragm with two of his fingers, breaking the skin, pulping the muscles, and nearly cracking his lowermost ribs. Speedwagon shrieked.

…​

“Keep him up!” Wamuu barked. “If he lays down he could drown in his vomit. Hold onto the shoulder and press down just above the solar plexus!”

Speedwagon gawked, barely able to hold Jonathan sitting upright as he choked and writhed, his sky blue eyes crossed, blood trickling out from under his shirt as well now. His instincts screamed at him to pull his shiv and swipe it across Wamuu’s throat, but he knew that would be useless even if he was in the right to do it. Jonathan’s proud, sculpted face was going from worryingly pale to even more worryingly red.

“Do it!”

Lips opening and closing wildly but releasing naught but an incoherent whimper, Speedwagon gritted his teeth against Jonathan’s weight and put his left hand to the rolling muscles of his chest just above this latest wound, where he pressed down firmly.

“Release! Jonathan, breathe in sharply and exhale immediately. Speedwagon, press and release at every one and a half seconds!”

Panic began to well up inside of him, but Speedwagon had nothing to do but obey. Blood was dripping all over the covers now, but the sight of Jonathan gasping and wriggling in agony before him made him unable to care what Clara was going to do to him for this. He used Jonathan’s own heartbeat to time his hand thrusts. Thank god, he seemed to be breathing in time with them now!

“Jonathan, breathe in deeper and out faster! Build speed and power. Speedwagon, faster!”

Speedwagon glared back over his shoulder at Wamuu. The nearly naked giant had taken a substantial step backward, for some reason, and while his voice was stern and commanding, his eyes seemed more wary than anything else. Like someone eyeing a spreading fire, or a leaking gunpowder keg. No time to wonder about that, though. He returned his full attention to Jonathan and began pumping faster. As Jonathan choked loudly, spitting a mouthful of phlegmy saliva down his own front, Speedwagon felt a sudden tingle in his hand, as if he was pressing it against a woolen jacket that had been rubbed against hair. Jonathan’s eyes were uncrossing, and his skin returning to its natural color, but his eyes had a strange, faraway look now, as if staring into a dreamworld while still conscious.

“Lean him against the wall. Keep pumping. Hold his nose, he can only breathe through his mouth!”

“YOU COULD GIVE ME A HAND WITH THIS, YOU KNOW!”

“I could not. Do as I say. And stop shouting, your sister told us to keep quiet.”

Growling in frustration, Speedwagon pushed Jonathan against the wall as softly as he could and put his left hand over his nostrils, letting his right take its place on his chest. With each breath, the tingling pulsed through his hands again. Was it just the adrenaline, or was he feeling more awake than he had before? Less exhausted? He looked into Jonathan’s eyes, and this time he seemed to be looking back. A little flash of elation ran through Speedwagon along with the static, and he pushed harder.

“Alright! Jonathan, keep breathing at that pace. Try to lift your arms! Make the heart work harder!”

Speedwagon was about to protest, but to his surprise Jonathan raised them without difficulty. He was no longer drooling, and his breaths were coming in strong, cool, and sharp. “That is enough, Speedwagon, you can let go of him now. Jonathan, keep breathing the way you are, and try to stand up.”

To Speedwagon’s even greater surprise, when he backed away from the bed Jonathan stood up almost immediately into the space he’d just vacated. Arms spreading wider, and higher, as he continued the short, sharp, surprisingly deep-looking breaths. It wasn’t just the rhythm and depth that was strange, though. Every exhalation that blew over Speedwagon’s skin carried a rush of that faint, tingling static. Jonathan’s skin had returned to its healthy fairness, but Speedwagon had never noticed the luster it had to it. As his eyes wandered, looking for the source of these subtle changes, they happened to fall on the hole Wamuu had punched in Jonathan’s shirt. The wound beneath it was gone, with only a faint, blue bruise and a hint of scarring in its place.

Speechless, he turned back around at Wamuu, to find the nightman grinning ecstatically.

“Breathe as you will, Jonathan Joestar,” Wamuu said, folding his massive arms over his chest and looking downright triumphant, “you do not need any more medical attention. With enough training, you might never need any more medical attention.” He turned his head toward Speedwagon, and his grin renewed itself. “You are already doing better than I hoped; you even helped Speedwagon’s neck.”

In his panic, Speedwagon hadn’t even noticed that the dull, aching pain in his neck had subsided, and the sharper sting that accompanied each breath in his own throat dulled. Blinking at Wamuu, and then at Jonathan, he raised his hands to his neck, and found the imprint of Eliza’s fingers no longer as swollen or painful to touch, and the cuts her nails had inflicted already scabbing over. Was it just his imagination, or did he also feel a residual electrical tingle around his throat, now that he was concentrating on it?

“My word…” Jonathan’s soft, cultured voice was far quieter than usual. Speedwagon looked back at the tall, dark haired man whose skin had taken on that undefinable sheen. Jonathan had removed the bloody bandage from around his right hand, and was inspecting it with wide eyes and open lips. The skin was still missing from the spots where fist had met nails, and the flesh around it bruised and swollen, but the bleeding had stopped completely. When Jonathan wiggled each of his fingers in turn, his face showed only the tiniest indication of pain. His wide, blue eyes locked on Speedwagon’s now, making him feel a little shiver. “Mister Speedwagon, may I?” He held out his partially healed right hand.

“Oh…sure, yes, please Mister Joestar!”

Jonathan smiled a little, almost bashfully. “You can call me JoJo, if you’d like.”

“Ha,” Speedwagon chuckled a little, though it made his neck hurt more than he expected. Without saying more, he stepped forward, and welcomed the strong, smooth-skinned fingers around his neck. Jonathan closed his eyes, and began breathing those short, but strangely deep, rhythmic inhalations through his mouth again. The tingle of electricity hummed through his fingers, and Speedwagon felt his own skin warm up all across his neck, face, and collar. When Jonathan stopped and reverted, looking somewhat exhausted now, to his normal breathing, the pain was completely gone, and the holes in Jonathan’s fingers had almost completely closed.

…​

As the bruises faded from around Speedwagon’s neck, Jonathan’s lungs finally protested too much, and he yawned, his breathing returning to normal afterward. He still felt sick to his stomach, and something about the inside of his chest didn’t feel quite right. But his hand. His shoulder. The claw-marks on his front where Eliza had drunk his blood through her claws. Only itching and that warm, static tingle remained in them now, with slight remnants of pain.

Removing his hand from the gawking Speedwagon’s throat, Jonathan turned back to Wamuu with no family name. The metal-muscled giant was still smiling, looking happier and more pleased with himself than Jonathan had seen him since they met the week before. He felt like he should be unnerved or afraid, but he was too dazed to feel any such emotions. Not even when Wamuu first flexed his chains or Aaron showed his fangs had Jonathan been so ungrounded.

“What is this?”

Wamuu unfolded his immense arms and pointed one of them at the faint glow of the drapes. “We call it the Sunfather’s Unseen Hand. Daymen have had their own names for it, at times and places where it is known, but the most common one is the Ripple of the Sun. It was they who discovered how to use it. I had to alter your breathing so your body could process it well enough to use these techniques.”

Jonathan looked from the pink-filtered dawn back to Wamuu, who he now noticed was standing carefully outside of its path. He felt like he was about to either wake up, or pass out. Or both. “I’m afraid that doesn’t quite answer my question.”

Wamuu chuckled, shaking his head and making the chains jangle. “I can tell you about the ripple, or I can tell you about the masks. One of them will need to wait until you have rested.”

Jonathan looked down at the wooden floor and tried to think. Whatever in God’s name he’s done to me, I don’t think it’s likely to kill me in the immediate future. The masks, I’m less certain about. Besides which, he’d already bargained for something specific, hadn’t he?

“The masks,” Jonathan sat back down on the bed, keeping his eyes locked upward at Wamuu, “and what they’ve to do with your…people.”

“What I think you are wondering the most,” Wamuu replied, “is who exactly creates the masks, where they are coming from, and why.”

Jonathan paused a moment, mulling over the words for any possible trap, before nodding affirmative. Wamuu’s smile faded, and he bowed his head forward a little. “There is a particular nightman. At least, he used to be a nightman; I do not know if you could still call him one. You have seen at least one picture of him. He invented the first stone mask and used it on himself close to the time I was born.”

The last vestiges of warmth had drained away from Wamuu’s face. The sharpness of his eyes became dagger-like, and his lips as hard as the ring that hung from them. The room felt as if the outdoor chill was suddenly invading it, when Jonathan looked at that expression.

“That is why I never met my true parents. And why there are so few nightmen now.”

Jonathan tried to form a mental image of what Wamuu was implying, but he was either too exhausted or knew too few details. However, if there was one thing he’d learned from the professors at Hugh Hudson, it was that the key to seeing into the past was in asking the right questions. “He turned like Miss Day, then? Stronger? Hungrier?”

Wamuu didn’t move a muscle, except to speak. “Hunger alone could be forgiven. Most of his victims were guilty of opposing his plans to continue the research. Or of trying to avenge their family or friends among the former. Then he and his…” Wamuu paused for an icy second before continuing. “…like-minded associates decided to be more proactive with potential threats. My first memories are from when the survivors had already spread out across the continent, hiding. Almost all have been hiding ever since.”

“Wait just a minute here,” Speedwagon interjected, his voice rising in both volume and pitch, “like-minded associates? Just how many are we talking about?”

“We have made enough noise already. Keep it down unless you want to upset your sister. There were two of them who survived the first battles. One more came into being shortly after. They may have recruited others since then, but I am not sure.”

“Alright, but then why in bloody hell would they give one of their masks to Eliza?”

Wamuu turned to look at Speedwagon now. To his credit, the scarred and hatted man didn’t recoil, remaining upright and fierce-eyed in the face of Wamuu’s stony glare. “He has never stopped experimenting. He will never stop, until he gets whatever power he and his think they are looking for. He tested the first masks on daymen before using them on himself and his followers. Same with every new version of them since. About two thousand and five hundred years ago, he also found a way to feed through the daymen they transformed. Since then, more masks have come out whenever they think they need some extra nourishment. The stronger they get, the hungrier. Every vampire is an extra mouth that their masters can gorge themselves through.”

Jonathan wasn’t sure if the queasiness was from the mental image Wamuu had conjured, or his diaphragm acting up again in the wake of whatever the nightman had done to it. But he also, despite his confusion and exhaustion, had a sudden realization.

“Blood,” he whispered.

Wamuu returned his attention to Jonathan, and twitched his head upward. “There is a reason the daymen of our homeland thought the gods had a craving for it, if that is what you mean.” He exhaled slowly. “Though if they still kept to that logic, they should start worshipping your guns and smallpox instead of your Jesus.”

Jonathan opened his mouth, and then closed it again. A flash of indignation cut through the haze, but he had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to act on it. Gritting his teeth and locking that whole train of thought away for now, Jonathan instead asked “How many more masks in England?”

“If the information that led me here is accurate, the one we destroyed last night was part of a set of four. There’s also the one you’ve been studying, wherever your mother got it from.”

Jonathan considered asking if his mother’s heirloom – though he almost gagged at the thought of ever having thought of it as such, now – was also part of a set, but realized before he could that if neither he nor Wamuu knew where that sailor who sold it had gotten the thing, then the question probably couldn’t be answered.

“Now,” Wamuu said, “I have a question for you, Jonathan Joestar. If you had a way of helping me eliminate the rest of the masks in your homeland, would you choose to?”

Jonathan thought about his hand. But, he also thought of all he’d seen and heard since he first set foot in Clara Speedwagon’s Respectable Establishment. Not fair, but few things were, and he’d made a promise to himself years ago that – childish though it might seem, in retrospect – he still had made a point of never breaking.

“I wouldn’t have a choice. If there was anything.”

Wamuu gave him an expression that could have been described as “coy,” were it on any face but his. “If you are not too exhausted,” he said, “try breathing the ripple of the sun again.”

“Again already?” Speedwagon interjected, starting to step between Wamuu and where Jonathan was sitting, “hasn’t JoJo had enough of this for one-” Wamuu picked him up by the collar with one hand and placed him back where he had been standing. Speedwagon sputtered and fussily fixed his hat. Wamuu looked back at Jonathan, clearly waiting.

Jonathan hesitated a moment, but then perked himself up as best he could and began the breaths, shorter and yet deeper than he had previously been capable of, in and out his mouth. After a few rhythmic inhalations, he began to feel the tingle of warm static in his still uncomfortable chest, and then more of it in what remained of his wounds. If he could just keep himself from yawning again…

“Stand up, and hold your right arm out in front of you, forearm turned upward. Keep breathing.”

Jonathan did as he was told, pushing himself reluctantly off the corner of the bed and standing straight, upper arm pointing outward and forearm held straight up. He realized, after doing it, that this posture looked remarkably like an Oriental martial artist’s position.

“When I count to three, take in a longer breath, hold it in, and bring your forearm down straight toward me with your two longest fingers extended. One. Two. Three!”

Jonathan did as he was told, sucking in an even sharper breath that filled his chest almost painfully deep. Unnaturally deep. Something he was sure his lungs wouldn’t have been capable of twenty minutes ago. The warm static became actually hot, and spread itself all across his body. His hair felt like it should be standing on end, though it wasn’t. When he brought his arm down and extended his fingers, the tingle amplified itself like a fountain of heat shooting down through his shoulder and arm and almost crashing against the ends of his extended fingers. At the same moment, Wamuu reached out with his own left hand and just barely touched the tip of JoJo’s electrified index finger.

Wamuu gasped in pain and started backward. Upon seeing him do it, Jonathan nearly fell over backward himself. Never had he seen Wamuu express physical pain, even with a face and back full of needles and nails. An acrid smell assaulted his nostrils. Speedwagon put a hand to his mouth.

The first finger on Wamuu’s left hand, from tip to second joint, had been burned away to ashes. The bones hung down, limply and uselessly, from the red and aggravated stump that was left.

As Jonathan gawked, Wamuu grasped the exposed fingerbones in his right hand and grimaced, his breath sharp and hissing. Even though he’d spent less than a day’s worth of time in Wamuu’s company, Jonathan still couldn’t believe that he was seeing genuine pain on his immense, olive-skinned face. It somehow seemed a contradiction in terms.

“You are even stronger than I thought!” Wamuu exclaimed, his voice slightly strained. “I was only expecting you to burn me down to the first joint until you had more practice!” He smiled, toothily, the joy in his eyes almost covering the pain. “Continue practicing your breathing and movements, and you could have the power to destroy a vampire with a single blow.”

Jonathan stared. His own heartbeat had never been so loud. “You can’t do this yourself, can you.” It wasn’t really a question.

“Our relationship with the sun is complicated. For now, you just need to know that the vampires inherit our own weakness.” He finally released his disintegrated finger, and inspected the damage more appraisingly. “I will need a small to medium supply of freshly killed meat. Speedwagon, tell your sister or whoever else is awake to visit the nearest butcher. You can expect payment from me tomorrow night.”

“Could I just catch you a couple more cats?”

“Yes, but I would prefer something fattier. I think Jonathan and I will need to stay here to rest. Assure Clara that I will clean all the blood away thoroughly when I have woken back up.”

Jonathan let out a long, defeated breath. “I’m sleeping…here?”

“I do not think you can make it back to your home this exhausted. Good morning.”

Speedwagon took Jonathan by the shoulder, patting him on the arm with his other hand as he did so. “Not a worry, JoJo, I can fix you a better room with not a single bloodstain anywhere visible. Come along then; I think we both ought to spend a little bit of time away from this one, meaning no offense.”

Jonathan followed Speedwagon out the door, barely even feeling the shorter man’s arm around his shoulders. All he could look at were the faint, circular bruises on his own knuckles, and the tips of his index and ring fingers.




TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[MagnificentLilyWitch]

Speedwagon is so gay. Its wonderful and his crushes on Jonathan and Wammu are sweet.

The anthrpologist and scoiologist in me are so happy that some of the "nightmen" survived Kars purge. Assuming that Wammu is truthful but I think he is based on the original work.

Its interesting that Kars is more obviously active then canon. I can't remember if Pillermen could feed through their creations remotely originally, was that something that he had to develop due to being hunted by nightmen like Wammu perhaps?

 

[Leila Hann]

Its interesting that Kars is more obviously active then canon. I can't remember if Pillermen could feed through their creations remotely originally, was that something that he had to develop due to being hunted by nightmen like Wammu perhaps?

It wasn't clear at all what the vampires were even for in the original.

There were some visual etc cues that suggested that the vampires were remotely connected to the pillar in Mexico, and I suspect that remote feeding may have been going through Araki's mind at some point, but it was never explicit.

Battle Tendency as a whole strikes me as having had a lot of intricate plans laid out at the beginning that the author completely forgot about a third of the way through.

 

[Leila Hann]

 

[Regency]

I assume there isn't gonna be stands and Araki's more developed storytelling with it for the parts after 3, with the concept being mostly set rather than Stardust Crusader's experimentations? (for me especially part 4's mystery, but others who have read it say pt 7).

...that's probably obvious in this fic being pt 1-2 reimagining lol

 

[Leila Hann]

I assume there isn't gonna be stands and Araki's more developed storytelling with it for the parts after 3, with the concept being mostly set rather than Stardust Crusader's experimentations? (for me especially part 4's mystery, but others who have read it say pt 7).

...that's probably obvious in this fic being pt 1-2 reimagining lol

We will not be adapting parts 3-7 in this parts 1-2 adaptation, no.

 

[Leila Hann]

5. Here Comes The Sun

​

It was just before sundown that the right carriage came up the snow-covered brick road on the outskirts of Aldershot, where Jonathan was waiting in his recently mended winter jacket. It wasn’t as cold as the last few nights, or as snowy, and after his ordeal the night before last he wasn’t sure if he’d even notice the discomfort if he waited here coatless, but he didn’t want to risk putting his new skill to the test against completely avoidable hypothermia. When the passengers dismounted, one of them separated herself from the rest and came up to him.

“Jonathan! Punctual, just like you always were.”

Jonathan smiled and bowed his head. “Actually, I’ve been here twenty minutes.”

Erina blinked her bright blue eyes at him. “You’ve been waiting outside, in this weather?”

Jonathan smiled a little wider, and raised his palms to indicate his torso. Erina rolled her eyes and snorted. “Oh come on, Jonathan, it’s not as if the cold cares overmuch about musculature, unless you’re hiding a portable furnace in your chest.”

Jonathan started reaching for her hand to demonstrate his body heat, but stopped himself before his hand made contact with hers in a manner that spectators might find indecent. Instead, he simply said “I fear you’ve spent too long in the tropics. Give it until next winter, and I’m sure you’ll be-”

She suddenly reached out and grabbed his hand in her gloved fingers before he could withdraw it back to his side. “Well in that case, you’ll have to keep me warm until then.” She smirked at his obvious surprise and discomfort. “Or at least until we get inside somewhere.”

It took a moment for Jonathan to regain his composure. “Somewhere, yes. I imagine your home is nearby?”

“Yes,” she replied, still clutching his hand as she looked up at him, “though it’s not liable to give us much room, or quiet. Mama and papa will both be home by now, and, well,” she exhaled a thread of white vapor and rolled her eyes again, “remember how they used to dote so relentlessly on their only daughter, and you always assured me they’d let up once I was older? Well, Mister Joestar, they did not.”

“Ah. Sorry.” Jonathan felt something he wasn’t quite comfortable with for a moment, but quickly snapped himself back before Erina looked too concerned. “There’s always mine, then. I remember we used to make the run in just fifteen minutes in snow deeper than this, and I’d be surprised if either of us has gotten slower.”

“Maybe not in this corset.”

Erina’s smile remained in place, but somehow the glint in her eyes – previously warm and mischievous – had turned icy. Jonathan blinked, lips parting, as he wondered what had just happened.

“Besides,” she continued, “I don’t know how much more privacy we’d have there.”

Oh.

Jonathan felt the same thing that he had when they’d met at the hospital. That sudden freezing of the heart, and sense that a hook had caught itself in his brain and pulled it back into something like a memory from a dream.

“I wouldn’t worry,” he said, forcing himself to chuckle and renew his smile, “the maids don’t snoop around. Father’s still in the hospital.” He paused, wondering if he should say it. “And Dio is out on some business with the law firm he’s been courting.”

Erina’s eyes warmed again. “Well, if you’re sure things won’t be too busy. I’ll just have to breathe very, very carefully against this corset.”

Was it just his discombobulated imagination, or was there a kind of secretive little smirk as she said that sentence? “I could always carry you,” Jonathan offered.

She raised her eyebrows sternly at him, but giggled. “Just what are you trying to get away with, Mister Joestar?” She then leaned in and hugged him, and in the blink of an eye the coldness around Jonathan’s chest and brain were gone.

…​

By the time they stepped into the foyer of Joestar Manor, both of them were very evidently feeling the cold again. The wind had picked up as they raced across the rolling hills, and snow had begun falling again, harder and thicker than it had since Jonathan’s night in London.

“Oh good, Molly!” Jonathan smiled through his frost-reddened skin at the maid as he and Erina rubbed the soles of their boots on the mat. “Take this lady’s coat, if you please, and dry it with my own.”

Molly smiled back, eyes pausing rather curiously on Erina, as she stepped forward to take their things. Erina looked much more comfortable handing her overcoat to the help than she had last time, seven years ago. Either she’d had some more experience with the upper crust in the Raj, or it was just Molly being close to the same age as her that helped.

“It looks exactly the same as it did,” Erina said, craning her head around at the massive, terraced chamber with its lime green wallpaper and lacquered mezzanines, and at the array of foreign curiosities lining the wall around the hearth in the corner. Her eyes stopped at a conspicuously empty hook that extended from the wall in between a medieval suit of armor and a pair of cuneiform tablets. “Wait…wasn’t there something there?” She pointed at the empty spot. Her eyes narrowed a little. “I think I remember there being something I found rather eerie when we were children, and…Jonathan?”

He looked back at her, forcing himself to put on the pretense of a comfortable smile for the second time in the last twenty minutes. “It’s just funny that you should ask. I’m writing my college thesis about that Mesoamerican mask, and I have it up in my room.”

“Oh right! It was your mother’s, I can’t believe I forgot. Well, I hope you’re getting a good study out of that ghastly old thing.”

Jonathan nodded, once again not meeting Erina’s eyes. “Yes. It’s…actually proven quite a novel avenue of research.” Even though he’d carefully cracked the heirloom into thirds and glued them back together in the manner that Wamuu had assured him would render the blades nonfunctional, he still wasn’t sure he felt comfortable with it in his house even just for the duration of his thesis work.

Erina pursed her lips and gave Jonathan another of those strange, half-curious and half-concerned looks. Fortunately, Jonathan was saved from needing to explain himself when an elderly man in a black vest and tie came in one of the side doors. “Molly, we’re about to eat. What’s go…oh, Master Jonathan! And…” he put a finger to his gray moustache and thought for a moment before his face lit up in surprise. “Why, Miss Pendleton! I nearly didn’t recognize you!”

Erina smiled dazzlingly, seeming to remember Rory as well. “Oh, Mister Kelly! Why, you don’t look any different!”

Rory chuckled and bowed his head humbly. “Aside from having half as much hair and twice as many wrinkles. But thank you nonetheless.” As Molly left the room with their snowy coats, Rory looked back up at Jonathan. “Are either of you hungry? Tea to warm up at least, Master Jonathan?”

Jonathan looked at Erina. It didn’t take a keenly trained scientific eye to divine the best answer. “Yes please, Rory. Extra hot this time. Some refreshment as well; we’ll take it in…” he thought for a moment “…you know, the studio has an incredible view when it snows like this. Father’s not using it, after all.”

Rory made a cheeky little salute, and Jonathan thanked him before leading Erina up the staircase, mindful to keep his hands well out of reach of hers while the staff had a line of sight.

“I remember the last time we exchanged letters, you said your father was thinking of relocating north to Bengal?” Jonathan asked.

Erina nodded. “Oh yes. The mountains there, you wouldn’t believe them. And some of the people I met, well.”

Jonathan gave her a curious look as he opened the studio door and held it for her. “Well,” she repeated, “let’s simply say that the world is stranger than I’d have ever imagined living in England.” She stepped inside.

“I’d have agreed with you, until a week ago,” Jonathan replied as he followed her in and closed the door behind them, “but there’s a London fellow I’ve met since then who, well…Great Britain is stranger than it’s often given credit for.”

She laughed. Her laughter was always closer to a giggle than anything else, but it was throatier now than when they were thirteen. Before them the drapes hung down over the ceiling to floor window that took up an entire wall, and on the cozy, dark red carpeting inside there sat a table, a couple of chairs, and George Joestar’s easel, canvas, and paints folded up and stashed away in the drawers off to the side. The little wooden stage before the window was bare. Unlike his father’s other favorite haunts throughout the manor, the studio had no smell of tobacco; George would never bring a fire that close to his papers. Jonathan pulled the drapes up, so that the twilight hills appeared, distant and ghostly, behind the flurry of snow.

“An archaeologist friend?” Erina asked as they sat themselves down.

Jonathan had to suppress a snort. “Not exactly, though he does have quite the eye for antiques.”

They exchanged a few more idle pleasantries until Molly came in with the tea and biscuits. “Relay my appreciation to Jan,” he told the girl as he poured himself and Erina a pair of steaming cups, “she always has an extra pot ready, doesn’t she?”

Molly grinned. “I’ll do that, Master Jonathan.”

Molly left, and Jonathan returned his attention to his guest. After taking her first sip, Erina loosened up considerably, leaning back in the chair and letting out a long, low breath through her mouth.

“I remember your father kept encouraging you to try your own hand at painting.”

Jonathan chuckled into his own cup. “You remember my handwriting, don’t you? Trust me Erina, the art world is far better off with me keeping my respectful distance.”

They had a biscuit and a few more sips each before Erina pointed out one of the smaller framed charcoal-on-paper drawings hanging beside the door. “The art world has already benefited from your modeling career, it looks like.” Jonathan looked up, and chuckled bashfully. The silhouettes of himself and Dio, at the age of fifteen, captured in dramatic pose. Jonathan holding one boxing glove upward in front of his face and using the other forearm to push Dio’s own fist aside. Dio’s other arm was pulling back, as if about to let loose another, off-handed punch in retaliation. This had been right after Jonathan hit the growth spurt that transformed him from a thin, round-faced boy into the tallest and broadest-shouldered student in their entire school. George had made him stand on the floor while Dio stood up on the stage, so that it wouldn’t look like Jonathan was just toying with him.

“Ridiculous,” Jonathan grinned, “I know. He did a more recent one of me, but it’s downstairs. Really, I’ve always thought his landscapes were his best work, though.” He pointed at the pair of oil paintings hung one above the other. Both views from the very window before them. On top, the hills snowy white as they were right now, but gleaming their icy reflections in midday sunlight. Beneath, they were green with grass, the little river that ran between them blue, flowing, and reflecting some powdery white clouds.

“Oh.” Erina nodded appreciatively. “That is a point well made.” Her eyes happened to wander from the landscapes to another, taller oil painting just beside them. She looked back at Jonathan, and then at it. “That must be your mother, then?”

The painting depicted a tall woman, her well-built back to the painter. Her dark brown ringlets were swept up and tied with a ribbon, and she was looking coyly over her shoulder back at the artist, a robe wrapped around her back below her unusually wide shoulders. Right at the junction of back, neck, and left shoulder, just above the robe, a faint, purple star had been painted.

“Was it the birthmark that gave it away, or the shoulders?” Jonathan asked.

“The chin at first, actually.” Erina gave him a more curious expression as she reached for the pot to pour herself another cup. “Did she really have a birthmark just like yours?”

Jonathan shrugged and raised his hands helplessly. “That painting’s supposed to have been framed before I was born.” He repeated his slightly embarrassed grin. “It is the strangest thing, though. Father says the midwife could hardly believe her eyes when she saw it. I want to think he was exaggerating when he claims she wanted to drown me for being some kind of demon baby, but I have only his word to go on.”

Erina stared at him, wide eyed, for a moment. Then, after failing to choke it back, she just started laughing. It only took a few more seconds for Jonathan to follow. Unfortunately, their mirth was cut short when Erina’s fingers slipped around the handle, and steaming hot liquid splashed out across the table, the teacup, and her left hand holding it. She gasped in pain and almost broke the teapot itself when she dropped it back into place, grasping her burned skin.

Jonathan bolted out of his chair fast enough to knock it over and ran around the table. Grimacing and hissing, Erina managed to pull her right hand off of her left and hold it up at him. “It’s alright, I’m the trained medical professional here. Just…some cold water, please.”

When Jonathan came back with a bowl of water from the half-frozen taps, Erina was standing beside the table with the back of her left hand pressed against her mouth. Her breathing was loud, but muffled by her own hand.

“Here’s the water,” Jonathan said, stepping a bit confusedly up to the table and placing the bowl and a bit of gauze he had brought down beside the tea set. He raised his eyebrows a little as Erina kept her hand on her mouth, even as she nodded appreciatively at his offering. “What exactly is it that you’re doing?”

Erina lowered her hand from her lips. “It’s a bit unorthodox, I know. It’s part of a folk remedy I learned in India, and it works much better than I expected. Thank you.” She managed a smile as she stepped back toward the table and lowered the red blotch on her hand into the cold liquid, gritting her teeth as wound touched water. As she waited for the numbness to set in, she smiled again and gave her eyes a self-deprecating roll. “I ruined a perfectly good cup of tea, didn’t I?”

Jonathan smiled back, and shrugged a little. “There’s plenty more tea, but you’ve only one hand to spare at most.”

“Why, you have quite the medical mind yourself, don’t you Jonathan.”

“Oh, my surgical technique is even better than my handwriting.”

Erina’s giggle brightened the room again as she leaned her free hand against Jonathan’s arm. She only left it there for a moment, however, before straightening up again, removing her left hand from the chilly water, and bringing it back toward her face. “Another moment, if you don’t mind?”

Jonathan nodded, watching her face and hand curiously. Erina parted her lips and sucked down a long, deep breath of crisp air, held it in for a moment, and then contracted her chest with almost harsh suddenness. She put her hand to her mouth, pressing her tongue against the glistening burned spot. Then, she pulled it back again, and took in another long, powerful inhalation.

Jonathan goggled, his head turning to the side as he studied her. After breathing out and licking her hand again, she turned back toward him with her own flaxen eyebrows raised. “Is something wrong? You look…well, distracted?”

Jonathan shook his head. “No, you have my full attention, Miss Pendelton.” He paused for a moment, still trying to decide if he had actually just seen what he thought. Then, he said “Can I try something?”

It was Erina’s turn to look confused, but she hesitated for only a moment before raising her wounded hand toward him. He took it, almost dreading the electrical tingle in her skin, but unsurprised when he felt the hairs on his arm stand up. Placing one fingertip on either side of the burn, he took in a long, deep breath and forced it out sharply. Then a second, more powerful, and a third as he fell into the rhythm.

Erina’s mouth fell open.

…​

She had prepared herself, mentally, for many things, when she imagined meeting Jonathan again. She was prepared to confront her regret for failing to write to him after the first years. She was prepared to sit in silence and wait for them to realize that they had become different people who no longer had any particular interest in one another. She was prepared to laugh and chat and rekindle their friendship, at least. But, through all these possible outcomes she had played in her head over and over and over, she had never thought she’d be sharing this with him, and indeed had been prepared to live her entire life hiding her witchcraft under his nose along with everyone else’s if need be.

There were so many questions that needed asking that Erina didn’t know which to start with. She’d need to ground herself again before she could even try to make sense of the static prickles building in her skin around his warm fingertips.

“Erm. Jonathan.”

He looked at her, face concerned and attentive even as he kept his breathing in what could only be a ripple-to-waves sequence.

“Try breathing out through your teeth, and then use your tongue to push the last of the air out of your mouth. It keeps the air flow in order, and lets you get the most out of your next intake.”

Jonathan stared at her, as disbelieving as she herself had probably looked a moment ago. But he complied, and his accelerating breathing took on a strained, hissing quality as he put his teeth and tongue to use. The next electrical wave was stronger, and the one after that moreso. After the tenth, she pulled on her arm, and he released her hand.

“So, um,” Jonathan said, looking as small as it was possible for a man of his stature to look, “it worked?”

Erina looked at her moistened skin in wonderment. It was nearly back to its normal golden tan.

“Perhaps you really do have a furnace in your chest,” she said softly as she looked back up into his deep blue eyes. “Or at least,” she said, gesturing to the veritable mountainside that was Jonathan’s chest, “you make some very effective use of that lung capacity you’ve been developing.”

“It’s a very recent development, but I suppose so, yes.” He paused for a moment, that sheepish, embarrassed smile that was the first thing she’d ever noticed about him taking over his face. “The furnace that is, not the lungs.”

Her lips curled upward for a moment, but she was still too dazed to hold a proper smile. “Recently, but…how did you learn it? I didn’t think there’d ever been a soul in England who could direct the ripple, until I returned.” She hadn’t been entirely sure of that, of course, but at the very least she wouldn’t have believed there’d been more than could be counted on two hands.

Jonathan appeared almost paralyzed for a moment as he tried to formulate his response. Was he simply having trouble expressing it, or was he reluctant to tell?

“But then, your chest,” he said. “Erm, just below the solar plexus?”

Erina flinched, putting both hands to her midsection at the memory. The Swami’s fingers, pressed together into a spearpoint, pulling away before her clouded vision, dripping crimson before she lost control and vomited. The days she’d spent recovering, as he’d coaxed her body’s nascent ripple-channeling capabilities to undo the internal damage, and the full month it had taken for the last of the soreness to pass. Swami Tonpetti had warned her that it would be especially dangerous to attempt for one so slender and slight, but after seeing what she had in the Bengali field hospital she knew it would be worth risking death. No true doctor or nurse would ever have been able to turn down the opportunity.

“Well, yes.” She slowly pried her hands off of her chest and back down to her sides. “I suppose that’s the only way, isn’t it.” She looked at his expression, and found herself coming a bit closer to managing a real smile this time. “It’s a bit late to be worrying about my thoracic integrity, Jonathan. The fact that I’m alive and, well, rippling means that the unpleasant part is long past.”

“I…just didn’t think you would risk yourself.” His eyelids flickered across his azure pools as his face darkened again. “Were you badly injured or sick, like I was?”

Erina shook her head. “No, nothing like that. I met a man from a very remote corner of India, a monk, who came to see one of my patients. When I saw what he could do for him, I knew any risk would be worth it.” As Jonathan’s expression changed from disbelieving to admiring (which gave her a bit of a warm feeling, she had to admit), she caught up with the last thing he had said. “You said you were hurt?”

“Probably not as seriously as the…man…who changed me thought.” Erina’s eyes narrowed at the way he hesitated, as if somehow unsure of himself, when he said the word “man,” but he continued before she could ask. “It was, well I already said, very recent.” Another uncomfortable hesitation. Jonathan’s voice lowered a bit when he spoke again. “Was the monk who did it to you a nightman?”

Erina blinked, unsure at first if she’d heard him correctly. He watched her expectantly, with an almost uncomfortable intensity. “I’m sorry,” she said, “is that a new euphemism for something?”

Immediately, Jonathan’s face went pale, and his eyes shot wide open so fast she nearly jumped.

…​

He was an idiot. A criminally thoughtless fool. Hadn’t Wamuu said that the ripple was something that only humans – daymen, he mentally corrected himself – could use? As his heart banged frantically against his ribs, he started trying to come up with ways to change the subject, lies he could spin that would make her think nothing of this. Just the word “nightman” couldn’t be dangerous for a person to know on its own, if that was all they knew? Even if the person in question possessed the power to use the ripple? No, lying wasn’t an option. Even if Jonathan were better at it, he knew he’d never be able to lie to Erina’s face.

“Jonathan, what is it? What’s wrong?” Erina’s head tilted slightly to one side. “And what is a nightman?”

His heartrate wasn’t slowing down, or his breath quieting. Could he try to deflect and change the subject? No, Erina wasn’t going to forget it at this point, not after that obvious reaction he’d just had. The only solution he could think of was to simply tell the truth, and hope that she wouldn’t resent it too much.

“I’m sorry,” he said, steeling himself for her displeasure, “but I’ve been sworn to secrecy on this subject. I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all.”

Erina’s eyes narrowed again, but not as much as they had before, and she still looked much more concerned than indignant. “Can you tell me why you would have made that oath, at least? To whom?”

Jonathan shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I’m sorry. It would be best to forget I’d ever spoken of it.” His fear began to mix with disappointment, as it occurred to him that this would probably lead to an early end for their visit. “Let’s just finish our tea.”

Erina shrugged her shoulders. “Alright then.” She let out a frustrated sigh, and looked back up at him with worried eyes after taking a moment to smooth back her hair, which had been rather disheveled by the effects of the ripple. A moment later, she flashed what looked like an ironic smile. “I’ll just pretend it has something to do with the blood-drinking demons and try not to feel left out.”

Jonathan had been starting to move back toward the table when she froze him in place again.

“Come again?” he asked, very slowly.

“It’s just a tale the monk told me. Apparently, the world is full of rakshasas who only the touch of the ripple can banish.” She shook her head. “Those parts of India are home to some peculiar beliefs.”

Jonathan didn’t say anything. He didn’t even think anything. Slowly, Erina’s eyebrows rose as she studied his face.

“No,” she shook her head, forcing out a giggle that had far less of the girlish mischief in it than usual. “You’re being clever again, Mister Joestar. Very droll.”

“Yes.” Jonathan said. “I was joking, of course.” He moved his mouth and made laughter sounds.

Erina stared.

“No. No.” She shook her head, her smile growing ever more humorless. “That’s just some old folk tale that the monk heard from another monk who heard it from another monk.”

Jonathan looked down at the floor. There would be no going back on this, now. What a wonderful job he had just done.

Erina’s smile dropped away completely, and her face became serious. “Jonathan, I’ll be very honest. I suppose I’ve mostly gotten used to the ripple, but it still scares me. People in the Orient believe in so many things. People right here in England believe in so many things, or at least they used to until so recently. I’ve wondered, if something like ripple could be real, what else might be possible. But.”

Jonathan turned away and looked back at the floor. “I’ve been sworn to secrecy. I fear that that’s all I can say.”

Erina stepped around him and put her fingers under his chin, pulling his head back toward her against his very token resistance. Looking up at him, she asked “Jonathan, are you doing something dangerous? Please just answer that much.”

Her face, all of its lines held sharp and motionless, filled his vision, and he could feel nothing but the fingertips on his chin and the weight in his chest. He nodded, pulling her hand up and down with his head.

“Well, in that case,” she released him, but kept her hand hovering in the air between them, “will you at least let me give you some lessons? I don’t have your chest furnace, but I could see that you really haven’t had much training or practice, and I’ve had at least a little. If I helped you with this, do you think that might make it less dangerous?”

Jonathan stared down at her for a long, heavy minute. Neither of them blinked.

“Yes. I think it would.” He breathed in deeply, and let out an exhausted sigh. “I’ll…speak to the person who I made the promise to, and ask him if it’s safe to tell you more if you know this much already.”

She nodded back. Her posture was still tense, but her face had softened a little bit again. “I’m not sure when I’ll have the time, but I know sometime this week I should be able to manage, even if I need to ask my father to negotiate my absence. I’ll write you as soon as I know, and…please do the same, just so I know you’re alright.”

Jonathan returned the last of the cold tea to Rory. Little more was said that evening, save a bit of tentative scheduling during the coach ride back to Aldershot, and the goodbyes when Erina disembarked.

When he got back home, he found an envelope waiting for him.




TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[MagnificentLilyWitch]

Aw. They are so sweet together! I was almost worried that they would Edwardian flirt past telling each other about their superpowers. I also see that Jnathan's Joestar birthmark (or maybe the original name was different? I suppose George could have taken the mothers name if her's was the more prestagious family.) protagonist powers are in full swing with his Hamon powers. Its nice to see that Erina has more skill though. I think we can guess who Joseph's first teacher will be.

Bad Jonathan! No telling! Now I guess we'll see if Wammu will allow expanding the circle of trust and if Erina will send any letters to Tonpetti about her suspitions that there might be an American Vampire in London (welll.... and the plenty of british vampires in rest of britain). She might not know about PillerNightmen after all, knowledge did seem fairly compartmentalised in the original work, so she might think that nightman is a ephimism for vampire or she might know the truth.

 

[Kiarael]

I'm enjoying Erina's expanded role and characterization

 

[Leila Hann]

This one comes with a content warning for severe body horror involving children.

And general Araki-ness. This is probably the most Araki chapter of the entire fic.

6. Rosy Lips, Teeth Within​

There was neither wind, moon, nor starlight, and the only sound was the slushy lapping of the English Channel. The newly built street lamps burned bright and clear – thankfully the snow had stopped hours before nightfall – but the tops of the countless church towers were nonetheless lost in the darkness of the midwinter night.

Despite himself, Johnathan let out a quiet chuckle as he watched his breath rise up toward the unseen steeples. It had only been a year and eight months since his last visit to Brighton, and it seemed there were even more churches now than there’d been in the spring of 1887. Looking back down at the freshly shoveled street, he walked a bit further toward the distant sloshing of the English Channel and, after looking a bit nervously up and down the way, walked up to the church door he’d directed the coachman to bring him near, and found that someone had stuck a piece of paper into the middle of the wooden door with a rusty old hat pin.

What troubled him much more than this, however, was that his own name was written in huge, awkwardly scrawled script across the top.

He let out a long, horrified breath and closed his eyes in a silent grimace before pulling it out and checking to make sure there was only a tiny spot of paint that had been visibly scraped before reading the note. Other than the word “Jonathan,” all that was written were the words “you’re late,” followed by another street address. Having half a mind to just find another coach and go straight back home, he trudged a few blocks further toward the sea before matching the address to another house of worship with a lower roof and a different array of symbols on display.

“Oi, JoJo!” Speedwagon’s voice suddenly boomed out into the silence. Jonathan looked over, and saw the man’s scarred face and long, greasy blonde hair spilling down from an open window. “Dreadfully sorry to give you the walkaround there, but you were almost two hours late, and his holy pomposity the Vicar threw us right out into the cold once it was pushing an hour since evening mass.” Speedwagon turned around to address someone in the room behind him. “Thank you again rabbi, he’s made it over.”

Jonathan wanted to say something indignant on behalf of that poor chapel door, but Speedwagon disappeared back inside and closed the window again. A moment later, the door opened, and Jonathan was welcomed in by a rather uncomfortable and befuddled looking man with a long black beard and a felt hat of the same color. In the dimly candlelit antechamber behind him, Speedwagon and Wamuu stood side by side, the former smiling and the latter impassive.

“Welcome,” the rabbi said, giving him a perfunctory smile. “Your friends have been getting impatient.”

Speedwagon gave an apologetic half-shrug. “I wasn’t going to put it so harshly, but the man’s not wrong.”

“The road wasn’t very well cleared,” Johnathan said, “I suppose I should have just gone to London and taken the railway. Sorry.”

“It does not matter. I know you came as fast as you could.” Wamuu cut Speedwagon off before he could say anything else, making the rabbi startle a bit. “Let us go now, there’s only so much time left before dawn.”

“Aye, just so,” Speedwagon nodded and picked his hat up off the table to press it down into his wild hair. As he and Wamuu trudged toward the door, Jonathan gave the rabbi an apologetic look.

“I’m dreadfully sorry for the inconvenience,” Jonathan said.

The bearded man shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. The way I see it, if two tall, mysterious men named Gavriel and Yonatan ask to come in from the cold? Well, I don’t know what the chances really are that they’re angels sent to test me, or why angels would have brought Mister Speedwagon along, but I’m not a gambling man.”

Jonathan thought he might have vaguely understood that, but decided not to prolong the issue. When they were back outside in the still, starless night making tracks across the snow, he turned to Wamuu and asked “I suppose you’ve found another of the masks here in Brighton, then?”

The nightman nodded, producing a metallic jingling sound as the chains swished around beneath his cowl. Speedwagon stepped up ahead of Jonathan and elaborated. “While we did the investigation that led Wamuu to realize Jack the Ripper was one of his marks, my mates stumbled on another lead in Southwark. This one wasn’t quite the paper-seller that Jack made himself, but when he came back from sniffing around there after we put poor Eliza to rest Wamuu told me he’d confirmed it was another one. Problem is, the killings there had stopped almost a month ago.”

Jonathan tightened his lips. “Nothing in the papers for this one? That’s strange. I suppose the murders started again in Brighton after ending in Southwark?”

“At least three children gone missing from the care of the same Brighton hospital, first one two days after the last infant disappeared in Bermondsey. No bodies left by this one, but Wamuu says that’s the next most incriminating thing after finding one with empty veins.”

Jonathan felt his eyes go wide. “Someone’s been taking children and babies across southern England, and no one’s been reporting on it?”

“Why would they?” said Wamuu, “your people do not care about children.”

Jonathan stopped in his tracks, eyes going from wide to angrily narrowed as he glared at Wamuu. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

Wamuu stopped as well, and looked back at Jonathan with his normally impassive face flavored by just a touch of confusion. “Am I mistaken?”

“Yes,” Jonathan said pointedly, “you are.”

Wamuu looked thoughtful. “Curious. I have seen dayman societies that care about their young, and I have seen ones that do not. This looks like one that does not. Perhaps I was wrong.”

Jonathan fell behind the hooded giant, gawking uncomprehendingly and trying to put together a response. Speedwagon kept pace, but moved a few feet to the side, carefully avoiding eye contact with either of them.

“Care to explain in more detail?” Jonathan demanded, quickening his step to put himself next to Wamuu again and glaring up into his gold-studded face.

Wamuu looked at him coolly, a hint of impatience making its way into his expression. “My people would not let children work in factories or fight in street gangs like yours, and ours can grow their arms and legs back if they have to.” He shrugged again. “But you know your people much better than I.”

Jonathan turned to Speedwagon for support. The Londoner still avoided his gaze. Jonathan thought back to his childhood, and how his father had done everything a man possibly could for his boys.

…

“You should have said you were afraid of dogs,” Jonathan said, accusingly, as he led the blond haired newcomer into the foyer. Outside on the front lawn, Jonathan’s Great Dane, Danny, was still whimpering, rubbing his snout on the grass where the boy had kicked him.

“I’m not afraid of dogs,” Dio said, keeping his eyes away from his new foster brother as he carried his one, tattered suitcase toward the stairs, “I just don’t like them.”

Jonathan glared at him. “So if I don’t like you, I can just come up and kick you in the face?”

Dio let out a short, utterly mirthless chuckle, still not making eye contact. “Try it if you want. I dare you.”

He started to ball up his fists, but his father’s words from just fifteen minutes before held him back. Dio is your brother now, JoJo. Try to understand he’s from a much less fortunate home than you are, and…just pretend the thing with Danny never happened, alright? It took some effort, but the knowledge that father couldn’t be more than a room or two away helped keep him from taking Dio up on that dare.

Letting out a long sigh, Jonathan asked himself what Dio might be feeling right now. He was in a new place. His own father had just passed away. Really, trying to imagine what that must be like, trying to imagine what state he might be in himself if father suddenly died, Jonathan supposed that he might also kick a dog that suddenly startled him. Well, okay, he’d never actually kick a dog even then, but maybe he’d kick a cat. What would be the gentlemanly thing to do for someone in Dio’s situation?

“I’m sorry I was cross,” Jonathan said, perhaps overly formally, as he turned back to face Dio again. “Here, let me help you bring your suitcase upstairs.” He reached out, smiling, and placed his hand on the suitcase handle, letting his fingers rest reassuringly atop Dio’s own. No sooner had his hand touched Dio’s, however, than Dio dropped the suitcase to the ground with a jarring thump, withdrew his hand violently from Jonathan’s, and with the other grabbed Jonathan by the ear, twisting it painfully and forcing Jonathan to double over with a gasp of shock and agony.

“You,” Dio hissed in his other ear as he continued twisting the first, “do not touch me. You do not talk to me unless I tell you to. You keep your hands OFF my things. Understand?”

He hadn’t told his father. When it happened again two weeks later, and this time it had been walked in on, his father had simply pronounced that “boys fight. I suppose it can’t be helped” and sent them both to their rooms. The next day, he reminded Jonathan again that Dio had come from a very difficult environment, and that he would surely calm down soon enough.

...​

“You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden, JoJo.”

Jonathan looked back at Speedwagon, who was standing closer to him now and giving him a somewhat concerned expression from beneath his bowler. He wondered what Speedwagon was like at age thirteen.

“Yes, just thinking about what he was saying.” Jonathan forced himself to affect a nonchalant expression that he knew Speedwagon wasn’t buying for a moment. “I suppose we’d best return to discussing this hospital, now?”

“There’s not much more to discuss,” Wamuu bellowed from in front of them, “it is at the end of the next block.” He raised a treelike arm and pointed at the new looking construction a few hundred yards and two more churches ahead of them, just shy of the waterfront.

“I imagine you’ve already devised a plan, then?” Jonathan asked Wamuu.

“Yes. We will tell the hospital staff that we are here to see a mutual acquaintance of ours. I have to board a ship back to the Americas tomorrow morning, which is why we are arriving late at night. They will tell us that visiting hours are long over. You will bribe them if needed.”

Jonathan clenched his teeth. “That’s why you asked me to bring so much, then?”

“Aye,” said Speedwagon, “that, and unforeseen expenses. But don’t worry too much; I’ll try my best to get us through on my charm alone.” He raised a hand to the brim of his bowler and tipped it a little.

“You’re also a well-wisher for this mystery patient, then?” Jonathan asked. Speedwagon’s tattered overcoat and unkempt hair weren’t exactly going to do them any favors.

“Of course not! I’m the one as is escorting you to him.” He pulled his coat open in the front, to reveal that instead of his usual drab buttondown and tie, he was wearing a crisp white smock and a glittering metal stethoscope under it.

Jonathan blinked. “Speedwagon, where did you-”

“That’s Doctor Swiftcoach to you, Mister Joestar.” He smiled, and cleared his bangs from his forehead with one hand while adjusting the stethoscope with his other. “And I got these paraphernalia clean and honest, I’ll have you know, from a physician friend of mine who owed a favor.”

“What sort of favor would this be, exactly?”

“Proprietary information, JoJo. Begging your pardon, of course.”

Jonathan just shook his head, squinting at Speedwagon disbelievingly. He tried to imagine Erina - or even more unlikely, her father - falling for this if someone tried it at their hospital. Then, upon thinking of Erina, and of his own father’s current residence, his expression changed entirely and his blood turned to icy slush.

“Wait. The vampire is hunting in a hospital? And no one’s made an emergency of it?”

“Well, like I said, it’s just been little children at least so far.”

He imagined creatures like Eliza and her murderous henchman skulking through the clean white halls he’d walked through for so many visits. Watching hungrily at Erina and her coworkers with those catlike eyes from every cellar and broom-closet. Slipping into rooms at night, and stretching their blood-sucking fingertips and fangs out toward a sleeping patient. This vampire had been moving around southern England, Wamuu and Speedwagon said. Perhaps, if it favored hospitals, it would move into another after this one?

He took in his first, deep breath, and shot it out quickly through his teeth. The warm tingle that started building in his body was reassuring, but it also reminded him even more of Erina. He’d already had her on his mind when he set out for Brighton. He knew that he’d have to confess his indiscretion to Wamuu, after the night’s bloody errand was taken care of, and had been hoping the nightman wouldn’t be too angry. But now, he could only think of the danger that neither he nor she had ever realized she was in, not to mention his father.

Maybe I’m not actually the one putting myself in danger. Maybe they were, this whole time.

…​

“Excuse me, nurse, but are you quite certain you’ve no one to tend to?” Speedwagon lowered his bushy eyebrows through the breakroom door at the lone nurse who had jumped up with a start at being addressed.

“I…I’m so terribly sorry, I must have lost track of the time!” The disheveled and bleary eyed young woman stammered as she lumbered to her feet, “Not to worry, Doctor…?”

“Swiftcoach. No need for apologies, just get to where you’re needed, it’s a dreadfully busy night.”

The nurse scampered out of the room, looking warily up at Jonathan and Wamuu and recoiling away from them a little as she shot off down the crisp white hallway. Speedwagon, resplendent in his own white smock, gleaming stethoscope, and incongruously shabby and damp looking bowler hat, grinned proudly at his companions before gesturing them into the now empty room.

“I still can’t believe that worked,” Jonathan said, giving a sympathetic look at the fleeing nurse over his shoulder before following Wamuu into the room.

“What’d I tell you about my charming presence and face you couldn’t believe would lie to you?” Speedwagon beamed and ran a finger down the scar that ran across his cheek. “You didn’t even have to spend a shilling.”

“Drinks are on me with the bribe money I brought for nothing, then.”

Speedwagon chuckled. “Well, I could never deny a handsome gentleman who offered me a double malt Scotch.” He batted his eyelashes at Jonathan. Jonathan didn’t dignify that with a response, but he couldn’t completely suppress the (very chagrined, but still) smile as he shook his head and turned his attention to Wamuu. The nightman, cowl still down over his circlet-adorned head, had pulled out the little cup of potion again and was blowing on it, watching the ripples. After a moment, he looked up with eyes narrowed.

“No direction. Or every direction. For the third time.” He cast his eyes suspiciously up at the ceiling, and then down at the tiled floor. “They are either on the second floor, or in the basement, and there are many.”

“How many could there be?” Jonathan asked, bracing himself for the answer.

“Some vampires cannot twist any others at all,” Wamuu replied, replacing the cap on the cup and tucking it back in his coat pocket, “most of the recent ones can have two or three slaves at a time. The strongest one I have killed so far had twelve.”

Jonathan suppressed a shudder as he tried to imagine what that would look like, and to calculate the odds. How close he – and moreso Speedwagon – had come close to death against Eliza, with but her one slave. Twelve Jack the Rippers, with their own Eliza leading them…even with the ripple, he wasn’t optimistic about this. Thirteen of the doctors, nurses, and patients all around Erina and his father secretly hiding blazing eyes and teeth like an eel’s. That thought made him realize that the odds didn’t matter; this had to be done.

“Downstairs is going to be easier to smuggle you through,” Speedwagon said, either choosing to not acknowledge what Wamuu had just said about potential numbers, or having already had that explained to him in London. “If you can’t get a direction from there either, we can try going up afterward.” He gave the ceiling a wary look. “Or just burn the place to the ground.” He saw the look that Jonathan was giving him, and rolled his eyes with an exasperated guffaw. “Oh come on JoJo, you didn’t think I meant it did you?”

“That only works when the sun is overhead,” Wamuu interjected in a slightly louder whisper, “and the vampire is forced to choose fire or sunlight. It would take a long time in the fire to kill a mask-wearer.”

“You are not suggesting we come back and burn a hospital tomorrow morning!”

“I am not. I am just saying that it would work.”

Jonathan glared at Wamuu and Speedwagon in turn, not saying a word to either. After a moment, the latter – looking rather deflated – sighed and led them back out the door. “I was joking,” Wamuu informed Jonathan, before following him.

Jonathan and Wamuu followed him in single file to avoid blocking too much of the hallway. Every doctor, nurse, and orderly they passed stared at them, but Doctor Swiftcoach’s businesslike expression and purposeful stride as he tried to figure out where the basement stairs were seemed to be keeping them free of difficult questions so far. Finally, just as they had passed the same pair of burly orderlies for the third time and Jonathan was sure people were starting to whisper suspiciously as they went by, Speedwagon took a new turn and opened a plain wooden door to reveal a dusty stairwell leading down into the darkness, its walls the only ones inside the building so far that weren’t plastered in that same relentless shade of white.

Speedwagon’s nose wrinkled as he stepped through onto the uppermost stair, and he put a hand to it. “God, it stinks down there.”

“Do you mean a normal bad smell, or evil?” Jonathan asked, still not entirely sure how seriously he should be taking Speedwagon’s claimed olfactory powers.

Speedwagon fanned the air in front of his nostrils, eyes narrowing suspiciously as his knees subtly bent and his shoulders subtly rose. “Both.”

Wamuu, who had pushed his way past Jonathan and produced his flask again, began unscrewing the cap as he watched the darkness below. As Jonathan’s eyes adjusted, he could make out a small landing beneath them, with two more doors.

“Excuse me, sirs,” a curt, nasally voice from behind them said, “what are you doing there?”

Jonathan turned around. One of the orderlies whose path they’d crossed thrice over, a tall, burly man with freckled skin and a black moustache that reminded Jonathan a bit of his father’s, was standing in the doorway behind them, head cocked, one eyebrow suspiciously raised.

“Ah, sorry for blocking the way,” Speedwagon said, putting his hat to his chest and climbing off the steps to try to squeeze himself into a corner that wasn’t filled with Jonathan or Wamuu, “these two gentlemen are going to be colleagues of yours starting tomorrow, and I was just showing them what’s where. Don’t mind us.”

The freckled orderly with the nasally voice just cocked his head in the other direction, and squinted harder. “New orderlies? We’re overstaffed as it is!” He took a little step forward. “And have I even seen you in the supply rooms before, Doctor? Why aren’t you having one of us show them about down there?”

Wamuu’s own eyes were beginning to narrow into hard, blue-lined slits. Jonathan looked down at the doors, and then back at the orderly, and took in a deep, chest-filling breath.

“Well, I’m sorry for coming in outside my usual hours to take some extra work off your dainty little shoulders, orderly.” Speedwagon turned his head upward in a contemptuous sneer. “I suppose if you’re that determined to have things your way, you can lead us from here.”

Jonathan slid a few inches across the floor away from Wamuu and took another breath. Wamuu’s eyes followed him for a moment, and then he gave a barely perceptible nod of his head before taking a nonchalant-looking step in the other direction, along the wall above the staircase. If he’s really just a man, Jonathan reassured himself, then this won’t hurt him. It might even heal him, if he suffers from any aches or pains. If he wasn’t one, though...

“Why don’t you start,” the orderly said, his high pitched voice getting louder and more confrontational with every syllable, “by telling me exactly who you are and how long you’ve been working here-”

Jonathan’s tongue jammed his last breath out between his teeth, and in the same moment raised his arm, extended his index finger, and brought it downward before poking the orderly’s wrist just below the hem of his sleeve. Speedwagon jumped back as a flash of yellow fire leapt up from where their skin made contact, but his yell of surprise was completely buried under the ear-stabbing, hellish whistle that came shattering forth from the newcomer’s mouth.

The next actions were so fast and so close to his face that Jonathan would have had trouble following them even if he wasn’t frozen in horror at what his own touch had done. The orderly went spinning – almost flying – past him down the stairs. Wamuu moved, and there was another scream like an overheated kettle, followed by a horrible tearing and crunching sound. JoJo’s eyes were sprayed with a thick, crimson dampness, too cool to come from a living man’s veins but too warm for an inert liquid in these surroundings, and before he could finish clearing them the sound of a door slamming below.

“Speedwagon,” Wamuu barked, “keep people out. Jonathan, follow me.”

Jonathan finished wiping the lukewarm black blood out of his eyes just in time to see Wamuu drop a human leg, the flesh of its upper thigh hideously and unevenly ripped and its bone crushed into shards where it had been torn free, to the floor. If he hadn’t been desensitized by their last adventure, Jonathan was sure he’d have lost his dinner then and there. Averting his gaze from the mangled, still-twitching limb, he scrambled down the stairs after Wamuu’s swishing coattails, careful to avoid slipping on the blood trail and hoping against vain hope that Speedwagon would find some way to keep the potential witnesses at bay. As Wamuu flung the door that the blood trail led to back open, Jonathan saw his cowl fall backward, and the chains that hung around his short blond hair begin to rise upward and thrash around. Sucking in another long deep breath, and pushing it out abruptly through his teeth while doing his best to ignore the dust and stink of damp soil and wood, he hurried through the door after the nightman.

It was dark, behind the heavy wooden door. The feeble light that shone in from behind them just barely lit up the nearest of the stacked boxes, crates, and baskets that filled up the rows of warehouse shelving and cluttered the earthen floors of the aisles between. The ceiling wasn’t terribly high, but the room extended far out ahead of them into the darkness, and now that he was inside of the storeroom Jonathan was sure he smelled blood as well as dust and dirt. Not just blood, though. Rot. Decaying flesh. A smell better suited to an abattoir than a hospital storeroom. The dirt and wood smells had masked it from outside, but now there was no mistaking that other stink of corruption.

“Light,” Jonathan whispered, “I’m going to need more light.” He shuddered as the salty, metallic essence of fresh blood jumped out at him from amidst the more general smell of decay. He was suddenly very grateful that ripple breathing didn’t involve the nose.

Wamuu craned his broad head across their surroundings, before gesturing to a gas lamp affixed to the wall a few yards left of the door. Jonathan, whose eyes had adjusted just enough by now to be able to distinguish its outline, ran over and turned the knob and lighter, finally bringing a weak, orange light to the warehouse, though it still only reached halfway down the aisles before being swallowed up again by the shadows.

“I knew I should have had those disconnected,” a surly, female voice drifted out from behind the stacked hospital supplies and jumble of shelving. “But, just one thing after another…”

Jonathan’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?” he called out into the warehouse, his voice echoing slightly, “show yourself!”

For a moment, there was silence. Then, a soft chuckle, with an undertone that Jonathan didn’t like at all. “Nurse Lamkin at your service, sir. If you’d like to see me, you’re in luck; I’ve just finished my beauty treatment. But you’ll have to earn the privilege and come find me yourselves.”

Jonathan looked back at Wamuu. Wamuu’s face was expressionless, his eyes narrowed and seeming to look in all directions at once. “Around the left corner,” he whispered, “outside of the light, I see another door. If it leads outside, she could escape through it.”

Jonathan looked in the darkness in the direction he was now indicating. He could make out nothing but blackness between the stacked baskets and crates. His mind raced.

“With your wind, and your vision,” Jonathan finally whispered, “do you suppose you could cover both exits at once?”

Wamuu craned his adorned head slowly over at Jonathan. “You want to advance alone?” His whisper was incredulous.

Looking warily out at the jumbled darkness and then back at his companion, Jonathan said “if I keep my ripple breathing up, then…?” He stopped himself from saying any more. Wamuu had said that every vampire was different, and he wasn’t going to take the chance that this one had superhuman hearing.

Wamuu’s blue eyes widened a little, and an unmistakable look of respect came over his rocklike features. “You’re looking to get yourself killed, or worse.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Not one that leaves the hospital intact. We will try your plan.”

It occurred to Jonathan, at that moment, that the suggestion of Speedwagon’s he’d been so unamused by would really be that easy to put into practice. They could simply wait until dawn, turn all the gaslights on, and throw a lit match into the warehouse behind them. If only there weren’t hundreds of innocent people, many of them sick and unable to move, on the stories above, it would have probably been the most attractive option. Building up the tingling static in his chest and then spreading it out through his body with his breaths, Jonathan stepped deeper into the room, wandering down one of the side aisles that hugged the wall.

“No need to tread lightly,” the voice that called itself Lamkin spoke up again, though from what direction Jonathan couldn’t tell, no matter how he craned his head around. “I can see you perfectly well. You don’t look like you work here.”

“And you do?” Jonathan asked, careful not to compromise the pace of his breathing around the words.

“You could always turn around and ask the staff,” the voice took on a much more sardonic tone, “they let me in, after all.”

Jonathan scoffed. “That’s not nearly as difficult as it should be, as far as I’ve seen.”

He was at the edge of the lamplight’s glow. His eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, however, and he could see the next gaslight protruding from a bare patch of wall up ahead. He advanced quickly, and started reaching for the valve, when a more solid shadow coalesced from the formless darkness ahead of him.

“You know what I am, then?” the barely visible figure asked, her tone still mocking.

Jonathan felt his skin crawl with more than the ripple static, and he lowered himself into a fighting stance. “I know you were a woman once, until you found a stone mask.”

She laughed. What shocked Jonathan was what an innocent, good natured sounding laugh it was. It reminded him more of Erina than Eliza. The resemblance was not comforting. “Found? That wouldn’t be fair to say at all. Why, if you could only meet the gentleman who came in from the wild moor bearing a gift.”

Jonathan blinked. “What do you mean?”

She laughed again, though it was more of a chuckle now, and with a hint of malice in it this time. “So many questions, and I know so little about my unexpected guests.” She took a step forward, and Jonathan could see a hint of bouncing curls and a swishing nurse’s skirt around a figure of average height. “How about instead we play a game. You move for the light, and see if you can turn it on before I get to you?”

Jonathan pushed his tongue against his teeth, and then opened his mouth to suck in another deep, filling breath. “I suppose that’s a fair wager, Miss Lamkin,” he said, his voice shallow as he spoke without compromising his air flow too much. He put one foot ahead of the next, and brought himself closer to the lamp, and to the woman behind it. He was unsurprised when she stepped forward as well. More surprising, however, was when she reached out with her smooth-skinned arm and turned on the gaslight herself.

The sudden flash of light stabbed into Jonathan’s eyes, making him blink and turn his head reflexively back. With a high, wild, whooping laugh that had nothing in common with Erina’s, the woman charged. Jonathan had only a blurred, tear-clouded impression of bouncing brown curls, gleaming, snowy skin, and long sharp fingers covered in thick blood before she was on him. Jonathan gasped, interrupting his next, careful intake of breath as claws like shards of glass pierced the skin of his face and neck.

He had been ripple breathing for several minutes, however, and though his concentration was broken, his body was still tingling from scalp to soles with that quivering energy. Barely a fraction of a second after she’d laid hands on him, Lamkin shattered the air with a horrible, whistling scream and flew back around a corner of shelving, trailing smoke and fire from her fingers.

“WHAT?” Her voice shrieked out from behind the cover. “YOUR SKIN IS LIKE THE SU…WHAT ARE YOU?”

Jonathan didn’t answer, focusing on regaining the rhythm and depth of his breathing. He barely even noticed as the tingling on his face and neck became a wild fizz as it healed the cuts her claws had sliced into them. He rounded the corner, knees bent and arms raised in front of him, ready to strike. When he ambled into the aisle though, she was already halfway down its length, standing just before an intersection that was still cloaked in darkness. Her fingers were burned to nubs, at least one and probably two joints of each crumbled away entirely, and smoke still rose from what remained. She glared at him, eyes flashing a luminous yellow, lips pulled back to reveal the two rows of ivory needle fangs he had come to expect.

What he did not expect was for her to tilt her head back, contract her stomach, and spew a fountain of high-pressured black ichor that tore through the air and struck him in the chest, where it burned like hot coals pressed into his flesh.

Jonathan screamed himself, and his hands shot up toward his chest, but he managed to stop them before they could make contact. No! I need my hands! Instead, struggling to shut out the pain, he lumbered around and scraped his front across the nearest wooden box, screaming again as the rough surface scraped against his boiled skin and tore chunks of it off. But it also took off most of the boiling black sludge, which dripped down the sides of the crate bubbling and hissing with steam. Agony like he had never felt exploded all across his chest. The room spun around him, and lights flashed behind his eyes. But his skin was no longer being eaten away, and, sinking heavily onto his hands and knees, he pushed back against the pain to suck in a deep breath and force it out. After the first couple of breaths, the pain began to lessen, drowned out by the intense static tingle.

From somewhere across the warehouse, he heard Lamkin’s whistling screech again, and then a loud thud followed by a horrendous, rumbling crash that could only be a shelving unit falling down. The rush of moving air that flowed over his sweat-coated skin a moment later informed him that Wamuu was using his headdress. There was another crash, and then a second, slightly lower, screaming whistle, cut short with a wet crunch halfway through. Jonathan recognized that crunch, from when Wamuu’s hands had found Aaron’s skull.

“Be careful, Jonathan! She has more slaves!” Wamuu’s voice echoed across the warehouse. He picked himself back up, gritting his teeth and forcing his head to stop spinning as he continued pumping charge after charge of ripple through his lungs. He had scarcely stood up straight again when he felt something grab onto his ankle, and tearing into it; were it not for his chest taking up all of his sense of pain, he knew this would have staggered him all over again. There was a rush of heat against his foot and lower leg, then, and a tiny, feeble whistle that died coming out.

He looked down at the floor by his right foot. The carcass of a newborn baby lay, twitching, on the packed earth, skin turning black and body shriveling as yellow flames engulfed it.

Jonathan stopped breathing at all. He choked. Gurgled.

The infant, now completely covered in fire, writhed helplessly on its back, tiny, blackened arms and legs just barely curling and uncurling. Its cheeks burned away, exposing jawbones laden with needle-shaped teeth. The flames died out as the last of the flesh and bones turned to ash and collapsed across the empty floor.

For a moment, Jonathan just stared at the darkening embers. Barely even cognizant of the blood pooling around his right boot. He gagged. He doubled over and clutched a hand to his stomach, wincing as he put pressure on the half-healed burns. If his stomach wasn’t empty, he knew he’d be emptying it now. He choked a little bit of air back in through the spit and mucous, but then his stomach heaved a second time and he was breathless once more. That was the state he was in when another of those heavy wooden crates went sailing through the air and struck him in the back, throwing him onto his stomach and cracking two of his ribs.

Gurgling through his own blood and saliva, he looked back over his shoulder to see who – or what – had thrown it. He saw only the last, trailing bit of white fabric disappear back around the aisle corner. Then, other noises, from the shelves on either side. A tiny little scampering, like something the size of a small animal crawling through the stacked boxes and bins. With his last coherent thought, Jonathan collapsed back on his front, pain shooting through his torso as he stressed his fractured ribs and put pressure on his burned chest, and he let his arms and legs go limp and closed his eyes. All around him, that little pitter-pattering sound, now unmistakable as pairs of tiny, soft-skinned feet, drew closer. He embraced the pain. Pushed himself out into the agony, and let it engulf him like a smouldering ocean as he brought air in through his mouth in long, slow breaths, and then out again much more quickly. Concentrating on the pain was better than thinking about what was approaching. Very small breaths. He couldn’t let her see his back and shoulders rise and fall, if she was still watching. Small breaths, but pulled deep into the bottom of his chest, in a way he couldn’t pull them until Wamuu had reshaped his diaphragm. He supposed there must have been a limit to how often she could spit her boiling slime, if she was resorting to throwing heavy objects now, but no matter what sort of projectile she would favor next he knew he wouldn’t survive being hit again. Slowly, painstakingly, eyes squeezed shut to avoid seeing what was encircling him, he built the tingling charge back up.

He felt the impacts of the tiny feet against the floor, inches from his skin. The first, clammy little hand rested itself on the back of his thigh. Then, he lashed out wildly with both arms and legs, sucking in a massive breath against his burning ribs and crushing it mightily out again. Three flashes of yellow fire. Three bursts of heat. Three tiny, faltering whistles from near his leg, head, and hip.

He rolled to the side until he felt himself hit the shelving, and then grabbed onto it and pulled himself, ripple breathing harder now, to his feet. If Lamkin still had a line of sight to him, hopefully hugging the wall would make him too hard to hit with another missile. When he opened his tear-filled eyes, carefully looking everywhere except at the floor where he had just been laying, he was grateful to see nothing but flickering gaslit shadows and mountains of stacked hospital supplies. As his senses returned to him, he heard another loud clattering, and another whistling shriek, followed by a distant rush of air.

Jonathan kept up the breathing, the pain slowly, incrementally, becoming less intense and being replaced more and more by the tingling buzz with each contraction. He looked both ways along the aisle. Then, on sudden inspiration, he reasserted his grip on the iron scaffolding and began climbing. There was only barely enough room between the top shelf and the wooden ceiling for him to crawl on his belly, but that was enough. He looked down on the far side, and was forced to clamp his jaw shut to prevent himself from gagging again.

Lamkin stood in the middle of the next aisle, just shy of the intersecting lane that ran through the middle of the storeroom. Now that he saw her holding mostly still, he could take in more of the details. Her hair was carefully, almost artfully curled, and hung in bouncy springs down past her neck and the collar of her now torn, ripped, and blood and dust covered nurse’s uniform. Her face was round, almost plump, with the swollen lips and soft chin and cheeks of a Renaissance art model. The expression on her face was one of mixed impatience and agitation. In her hands she held another infant. It smiled up at her, fangs gleaming in the partial light. She didn’t return the smile, but simple punched each of her half-burned thumbs into the soft skin of the baby’s chest. It continued smiling vacantly up at her as its plump body became thin and emaciated, and Lamkin’s skin flushed a rosy pink as liquid flowed up through the veins of her wrists, and her fingers healed.

“You really ought to try it yourself before judging,” she said, just as Jonathan began to suck in another ripple-building breath, “I’ve tried other blood, but there’s nothing quite like the wee ones.” She looked up at him, and smiled insincerely. “Or have you tried it? You seem to heal near as fast as I do.”

Jonathan swallowed, his ripple breathing faltering again before he caught himself. “Infants,” he whispered down at her, not sure himself if it was an accusation or a question.

She dropped the withered, hole-ridden, but still wriggling baby on the floor, and reached up with a mostly regrown hand to sweep back some errant, dust-filled curls. “It’s quite ironic,” she said with another little chuckle, “looking after them was a part of my occupation, before the mask. Had a couple of them myself even, though they’re all grown up and having more of their own by now.”

Jonathan’s eyes widened. She didn’t look a day older than twenty-five, at most.

Trying to keep the reality of what he’d just seen her do - what he’d seen of her handiwork ever since starting down the stairwell - out of his mind, Jonathan stopped his quiet ripple-breathing long enough to speak full sentences. “You have children?” He said to her, keeping his lungs tightly controlled so he wouldn’t scream, or gag. “Grandchildren as well?”

Her curls bobbed atop her head as she nodded yes, a frown coming over her pretty face. “Yes. Not that any of them have written in years.”

Jonathan felt his eyes sharpen, and his heart lighten just the smallest amount. He had talked Eliza down, even when she’d held a prospective meal in her talons. Perhaps, if he chose his words carefully enough...he breathed deeply and spoke again. “I’m sorry to hear that. Did they move far away?”

Her head shook the other way this time. “No. Not that far, at least. I may not have been the best mother, looking back.” She shrugged her shoulders, sighing to herself a little as if bemoaning a lost pair of slippers. “Too much time spent on other women’s babies, maybe. But, well, that’s why I took that handsome fellow’s offer, isn’t it?” A smile suddenly returned to her face. It would have been dazzling, had her lips not been open enough to show the needle-shaped fangs.

“The gentleman from the moor?” Jonathan asked, still hoping he was getting somewhere as he tried to look at her eyes and not think about those lethal teeth.

“Oh, you are paying attention! That’s another thing that didn’t used to happen very often! And yes. He couldn’t let me live my life over, he said, but he could at least make me young again, and take away all those regrets. And he told me the truth and nothing but it!”

Her arm shot out again, and grabbed something from behind one of the boxes on the shelf beside her. Another infant squirmed and wriggled in her grasp. She grinned broadly, and sank her fingertips into this one as well, causing its body to tighten and wither even as it struggled. Jonathan almost lost his grip as she drained another tiny body dry.

“It used to bother me so much, when I lost one to cholic or plague. Even moreso one of the mothers. But now?” She giggled, dropping the second exanguinated husk to the dirt floor. “It never once occurred to me they could be so, well, nourishing. And it just so happens that the smaller the bodies are, the more of them I can reanimate at once. Really, once you’ve made that discovery, there’s hardly reason to drink anyone else.”

He wanted to say something to that. There had to be something that one could say to that. His breath was gone again, and his flesh had turned clammy.

She took a step closer, still craning her head up at him. “What are you and your friend, though? You’re not quite like us, but you’re definitely not just human.”

Jonathan would have tried to stammer an answer, but even through his horrified daze he had already noticed the contraction in her stomach, and the way she was starting to, very subtly, lean her head back. He rolled back the way he had come, tumbling off the shelf and just barely managing to catch himself on the scaffolding, the instant before a stream of boiling black tar tore into the ceiling and rained down onto the shelf where he had just been. He panted, desperately, not sure if he was more grateful to have escaped the boiling liquid, or to simply no longer have Lamkin in his sight.

He heard her footsteps racing down the aisle on the other side of the shelves. Then the surroundings went dark again, just as Jonathan realized she had been moving toward the gaslight she lit before.

Anticipating what was about to happen, Jonathan ran as fast as his injured ankle and burning, broken chest allowed back the other way, toward the end of the storeroom that was still lit and where Wamuu was guarding the doors. He heard something whoosh through the dark, dusty air behind him, and threw himself down on his belly just as he was crossing the central aisle. His torso exploded in agony once again when he hit the floor, but his decision was vindicated when another crate flew just over his head and smashed itself open against the floor ten feet in front of him, sending splinters and bits of broken syringes and beakers flying. Half a dozen small cuts opened across his forehead and shoulders as bits of shrapnel embedded themselves in his skin; he was fortunate his eyes had been nearly pressed to the ground and thus protected.

He heard Lamkin rushing up behind him through the darkness as he lay prone. He started rebuilding the ripple charge in his body despite the dust and choking chemical powders he was now inhaling with each deep breath, and weakly rolled himself over onto his back. I hope she does what I think she’s doing.

Sure enough, a second crate shot toward him, this time angled to smash his body against the hard-packed earth as it hurtled in on an angled descent. Jonathan could barely see the blur of motion as it streaked out of the darkness, but he heard it, and the reflexes he’d honed on the college sports field sprang into use. He kicked out with both feet, while pulling an extra-deep breath into the bottom of his lungs, and pointed his toes outward in a straight line away from his chest as they stabbed into the wood. As expected, new explosions of agony ripped away at each of his toes as they struck and broke against the crate, only for the pain to be just as quickly buried under a tide of soothing, electric tingle as all the ripple he had been building rushed into his toes. A compound sensation emerged, one which lacked an English word to describe. The feeling of the body healing itself just as quickly as it sustained damage. There was a boom like a gunshot as the crate exploded, and once again pieces, shards, and hospital goods went bouncing against the shelving all around and clattering to the floor. It worked! I healed my feet as fast as they broke!

What Jonathan had not been expecting, however, was the pained whistle from just ten feet or less away. Surprised, Jonathan leaped up to his feet, avoiding the use of his toes where possible and burying the pain under more ripple where not. Silhouetted in the semi-darkness of the intersection, Lamkin was covering her face, the blood-dripping fangs all visible as her mouth stretched open in an ongoing vampire shriek.

There were burns all over her. Most of them small, but a few large and severe enough to have blackened little pits and trenches into her skin. The largest, deepest pit in her forehead, Jonathan could just barely see through the darkness between her clawed fingers, had a flake of splintered boxwood protruding from its center.

Jonathan’s jaw dropped, and his mind raced. She must have rushed at me just after throwing the second crate, hoping to finish me off, and when the pieces hit her from that close by the ripples were somehow...carried?

Before he could finish that thought, Lamkin thrashed her hands away from her half-ruined face and dropped to the floor, where she grabbed something before leaping toward him again. The steel blade of a bonesaw flashed in the distant gaslight. Jonathan started backward, just barely avoiding the descending blade, but in that same moment she threw something with her left hand; something heavy and sharp that bit into his left cheek and sent his head reeling to the side. Before he could recover, the vampire charged again, bringing the bonesaw downward straight toward his skull. Jonathan dropped to the floor, but the saw was still arcing down, still approaching his head. His ripple charge was depleted, and he had no room to roll aside.

Yet another object came whizzing through the darkness, this time from the opposite direction. Lamkin’s hand, still gripping the saw, suddenly went limp, causing the flat of the blade to bounce harmlessly off of Jonathan’s cheek. A dark gray bowler hat with a rim covered in blades was embedded in Lamkin’s wrist, and her hand was hanging from it by a writhing thread.

Jonathan breathed in through his mouth, out through his teeth, and then raised his forearms and brought them down to jam both his index fingers into Lamkin’s ankles. The loudest, most piercing whistle yet blew into Jonathan’s eardrums as the woman collapsed to the floor, yellow flames leaping up beneath her skirt. Jonathan breathed in and out again, closed his eyes, and grabbed her by the head with both sets of fingertips. He felt his hands burning, saw a brighter flash of light through his sealed eyelids, and heard hissing-hot ashes tumbling out across the floor below.

Five silent heartbeats later, Jonathan opened his eyes, and looked down at what remained on the ground in front of him. Ashes. Meat, half cooked, and yet still writhing and twitching. White cloth burning slowly to black, and a pale stone mask with a blankly serene expression half-poking out from beneath.

Then, barely breathing at all, he turned around and looked at Speedwagon. A moment later, Wamuu stepped out behind him. His cloak was soaked from collar to hem in red and black, and had been sliced open in half a dozen places. One of the sleeves had been burned away, and the forearm beneath it was red, blistered, and dripping hot black ichor. Wamuu barely seemed to notice.

“Jonathan,” Wamuu said, “the mask.”

After staring silently at the other two for another moment, Jonathan looked back down at the floor. Moving slowly, suddenly much more aware of his countless wounds and how they ached and pulled at his skin and muscles than he’d been a moment ago, he knelt down and pulled the artifact out from under the smouldering gown. After stomping out the last of the flames, Jonathan walked over to them and handed the mask to Wamuu, who promptly shattered it against his knee. Then, the silence returned.

Jonathan looked at Speedwagon. The other man stared back at him, his scarred face unmoving, his eyes wide and blank.

“I saw.” Speedwagon said, after a few seconds longer.

Jonathan hesitated before replying. “I think you saved my life, Speedwagon.”

“That just makes us even.” There was no humor or bombast in Speedwagon’s voice as he said it. “Are you alright, JoJo?”

Jonathan forced himself to do something like smiling. “Surprisingly, I think so.” He was still controlling his deep-chested breathing, and the pains throughout his torso, feet, and face were slowly being pushed back.

“Do you think you can get us back out of here, Speedwagon?” Wamuu asked.

Speedwagon slowly turned around and just glared at him. “The entire staff besides the ones that pushed past me is crowded around the door, and the coppers will be bursting in any second.”

Wamuu nodded, pulling his ripped, gory cowl back up over the bronze and ivory circlet and chains that adorned his head. “Then we’ll have to take the other door and hope it leads out through a different route.”

He turned around and marched toward the second door. The shelving around which, Jonathan saw upon rounding the corner to follow him, had all been knocked over or smashed into monstrous heaps, and covered in blood and broken bodies of the two other orderlies Jonathan had seen before as well as half a dozen infants. Neither Jonathan nor Speedwagon needed any more prompting to put the storeroom behind them.




TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[MagnificentLilyWitch]

This was a very well written chapter.

Even knowing what was probably coming you kept the tension slowly rising. The reveal was quite upsetting, I really empathised with Jojo.

On a lighter topic Swiftcart continues to be a gay delight and it is wonderful. He is actually contributing to fights as well which is a big step up from the manga.

It is interesting that the spreader of the stone masks (Kars? or maybe ACDC or Santana?) has targeted women so far. Maybe they have a policy of giving them to disadvantaged groups with in societies?

Nice to see Jojo learn about the Ripple organically through combat without a greek chorus in this version.

 

[Kiarael]

Ah, I see this one was about Ethics in Babyeating

 

[Leila Hann]

Long Lankin*

​

*There are several versions of this very old murder ballad. We named her after the Lamkin version, but this n-variant was the best version on Youtube.

 

[Leila Hann]

Content warning for sexual assault.

7. Straight Through The Heart​

The fire crackled weakly as the last bits of ice in the wood thawed and trickled out into the flames. Jonathan poked the logs around with the stout tree branch he’d broken off, keeping the beginnings of the campfire from drowning as it melted the remaining patches of nearby snow and occasionally feeding it with another handful of the lint they’d gathered from the trash heap outside the laundry. Thank god the awning had kept it mostly dry. They’d already used up most of the kerosene from their one lantern, and the rest needed to be kept for emergencies; if the police found their trail, they’d likely be forced to flee into the snowy wilderness. Speedwagon, whose clothes alone were unbloodied, stood between Jonathan and the winter breeze, holding his coat open to block as much of it as possible from reaching the other man’s naked back and shoulders.

“I hope he finishes soon,” Speedwagon said, staring out from under the pier at the dark, slushy ocean that lapped against the beach. He returned his gaze to Jonathan, huddled over the fire. “You’re really sure you aren’t going to freeze yourself to death by then?”

Jonathan nodded his head, which still dripped with a bit of blood and black ashes. All across his immense, barrel shaped chest and hard, muscular stomach there were wounds much ghastlier than the scratches on his face and neck. Especially the mass of skin peeling and cracking away off the front of his chest and upper belly; new, healthy skin was starting to appear underneath those cracks, but this had been a gradual development over the past thirty minutes. “I’ve been keeping myself full of ripple as much as I can,” he said, “it helps against the cold.”

In truth, though the fire was helping, Jonathan wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep this up. His lungs were exhausted, and his head was spinning. He’d been doing the ripple breathing for one minute out of every two, and then one out of every five, but he couldn’t keep it up forever. Not with his chest in the state it was in. He looked down at his body, naked but for his underwear, and took account of the burn again. There was no more raw flesh visible under the cracked skin; just a little bit longer, he thought, and he could peel it off and hopefully only have a bit of scarring.

“I really do need to get my own lungs stabbed open, if I’m going to keep helping you with these enterprises.” Speedwagon shook his head, long hair flopping around his shoulders. “It might kill me, sure, but so might everything else I do.” He watched Jonathan’s back in silence for a bit longer. “Are you alright besides that?”

Jonathan looked down at his burn again, and raised a hand to feel the remains of the cuts on his forehead. They had all closed, and the scabs seemed nearly ready to fall off. “If I can keep the ripple going I’ll likely look as if I’d never been hurt by tomorrow night.” He looked back over his shoulder to give Speedwagon a reassuring smile. “Thank you again for blocking the wind, though.”

The waves lapped against the rocks and sand a few yards down the slope from them. On either side of the pier, tiny snowflakes began drifting down, catching the firelight for a moment each before vanishing. After another silent moment, Speedwagon stepped up closer to Jonathan and started taking off his own coat.

“I told you, you need that more than I do,” Jonathan said impatiently.

“Poppycock, JoJo. I see how you’re doing that ripple breathing thing less and less. I’ve still got a shirt on under this, which is more than you do. Besides, I’ve got the hottest blood in all of London. Sometimes when the baby’s cold, Clara just has me hold him for a bit and that does the trick in just a minute, it does…” Speedwagon’s voice fizzled out, and his jovial expression faded away. “Perhaps,” he whispered, “I should have used a different example.”

Jonathan nodded slowly, still staring at the fire as he poked the logs around.

“You saw more than I did, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

The frosty silence continued, pushed back a little by the crackling of the growing fire. The snowflakes drifting down on either side were visibly white now.

“There’s someone I know who works at a hospital. My father is in that same hospital. This could have so easily been theirs.”

Speedwagon stepped up beside him, and rested an arm on his bare shoulders. He was right; even through the fabric of his sleeve, he did have a rather high body temperature. Jonathan didn’t complain.

“Who’s that someone, if you don’t mind me prying?”

Jonathan looked up from the fire. “I was actually planning to talk about her when Wamuu returns anyway. She’s an old acquaintance of mine who just returned from India.”

There was a moment of awkward hesitation before he said the word “acquaintance.” Was it just him, or did Speedwagon’s arm go a little looser on his shoulders?

“I already lost one friend to these masks myself,” the smaller man said, looking into the fire alongside Jonathan, “and any one of those children could have been my baby nephew as well.”

They looked at each other, Jonathan’s high, chiseled face and Speedwagon’s scarred and heavy-browed one. The first tear crept from each of their eyes. A moment later, they were sobbing into each other’s shoulders beside the crackling, hot fire. The fact that Jonathan had just killed someone - taken a human life, no matter how questionable its humanity by that point - would have been weight enough. On top of everything else...

“I am back,” Wamuu’s voice pulled them out of their cathartic sobbing. Looking up over Speedwagon’s head, Jonathan saw Wamuu lumbering back out of the darkness, nearly naked himself and carrying a bundle of dripping cloth under one arm. In the other hand, he held half of an Atlantic cod, still weakly thrashing without its head and the upper third of its rib cage. He set the dead animal down beside the fire, wiping a bit of fish blood off of his own pierced lip now that that hand was free, and began giving their clothes another wringing to get a bit more seawater out of them before hanging them by the fire. His own body, made of muscle slabs and cords that looked more like steamworks grinding beneath his olive skin than muscles, dripped and steamed as he stood by the fire himself.

“That, erm…head is going to be enough for you?” Speedwagon asked, almost cautiously, as he wiped his tears away.

“I also ate a bird,” Wamuu said. He didn’t seem to register the other two’s tears, or the fact that they were embracing. As Jonathan watched, he set the bundle of clothes down on the concrete pedestal of one of the pilings and picked up his chain-hung circlet from where he had left it. Jonathan hadn’t been paying much attention when the night man had taken it off, but now that he watched, he realized that that ivory horn at the front of the circlet was missing; in its place was only a small, circular hole going all the way through the metal. When Wamuu placed it back on his head, he did so by angling it down from the front, so as to catch that hole around the thin, two inch barb protruding from the center of his damp hairline.

“I didn’t notice you had a horn,” Jonathan said as he and Speedwagon released each other.

“It took me some time to realize what unnerved me about daymen,” Wamuu said with a faint smile as he finished adjusting the circlet atop his drenched hair, “before I realized that none of you had any. I got used to it after a few decades.”

Jonathan’s mind went back to the drawing on his bedroom desk. The long-haired man with three horns, all short, straight, and pointed just like Wamuu’s, arrayed across his forehead. Once again, he found himself struggling to internalize the reality that he was talking to a four thousand year old man, representing a race of creatures that humankind had shared the earth with unknowingly since its origins. There were so many more questions he wanted to ask, but right now he was simply too exhausted. He was beginning to fear that he would always be too hurried or exhausted or busy to ask Wamuu about these things like a proper archaeologist.

He did remember what he really needed to talk about first, though, thanks to his conversation with Speedwagon.

“Wamuu,” he said after the nightman had dried his immense, mountain-like body by the fire a bit, “there’s someone I know who can use the ripple.”

Speedwagon gawked at Jonathan silently. Wamuu looked over, his expression quizzical. “In England? That is surprising. How did you meet this person?”

“She’s someone I knew years ago, actually. She just returned here from the orient, and had the…procedure…performed on her by a Hindu monk.”

Wamuu’s eyebrows rose, slowly, as did the corners of his mouth. Before Jonathan realized it, the giant’s eyes were glowing in what looked like exhilaration, or triumph. “You will have to excuse me for a moment,” Wamuu said. Then, his jaw went slack, his eyes rolled up into his head, and his body went limp. Wamuu crumpled to the ground in an immense heap of muscle and sinew, not moving so much as a finger.

Jonathan and Speedwagon both stood over him, blinking in confusion.

“Mister Wamuu?” Speedwagon asked, kicking his arm a little with the toe of his slush-covered boot. “Mister Wamuu, are you alright?”

Jonathan held up a palm, signaling Speedwagon to back off. They watched in silence for about thirty seconds, at which time Wamuu rolled his eyes back into position, blinked a few times, and got back to his feet. “That was exciting news,” he said by way of explanation as he adjusted his circlet back into place around his head and horn, “I needed a moment to get my emotions under control. Continue.”

The other two stared at him. Speedwagon raised his hand and started to gesticulate, but then lowered it and closed his mouth again without speaking.

“Is that…typical…of your people, Wamuu?” Jonathan managed to ask.

Wamuu raised his eyebrows nonchalantly. “We each have our own version. Discovering how to keep yourself even is an important part of growing up for nightmen. Tell me the rest of what you wanted to about the ripple user.”

“Yes, of course.” Jonathan took a moment to remember what he had wanted to say about Erina, and then felt a shock of dread when he wondered how Wamuu would react to this next part. He considered, half seriously, if he should start rebuilding his own ripple charge before continuing, just in case Wamuu lost control and started choking him to death. No, no. He would stand tall, admit his indiscretion, and suffer what consequences might follow. “When I found out about her, I made the mistake of assuming she already knew much more, and I didn’t guard my words as I should have. She knows I’ve been fighting vampires now, and I said the word ‘nightman’ to her, though not what it means.”

Wamuu neither collapsed again, nor exploded in rage. Instead, he just smiled a little bit. “I did expect more mindfulness from you, Jonathan. Do not do this again.” He paused a moment, and then looked meaningfully at Speedwagon for a moment before smiling wider. “But this particular mistake of yours may have been for the better. Tell this woman that I wish to meet her before she learns any more.”

Jonathan wasn’t sure if that was a relief or not. That strange smile was still on Wamuu’s face, and something about the way he had looked back and forth between himself and Speedwagon…Jonathan felt like there was something going on here that he didn’t even know how to ask about. A quiet unease came over him, and he found himself wanting to change the subject. Fortunately, there was an unrelated question he had to ask.

“I’ll speak to her about it. There’s also something I have to ask you, though. When I was in the storeroom, something happened when I broke a crate while using the ripple. It was as if,” he shuddered a little at the memory of Lamkin’s face cratered with burns and her whistling scream stabbing into his ears, “the fragments were carrying it away with them. They actually burned Lamkin when they touched her.”

Wamuu gave him an appraising look, as if moderately impressed. “Most languages call that something like the ‘flow of power.’ A strong enough ripple concentration can travel through inert things just like living ones, though materials that used to be part of something alive carry it the furthest. I have seen various techniques for using this, but it is not something I could be taught.” He thought for a moment before continuing. “If your friend knows any of those methods, you should ask her to teach you them. They are useful.”

Jonathan nodded thoughtfully, and looked back at Speedwagon standing by the fire. The man was unusually quiet, staring into the flames as he warmed his hands. Wamuu strode back to where he’d left their wet clothes and picked up Jonathan’s coat, reaching upward to hang it from a loose nail in the woodwork overhead just beside the updraft of the fire. As Jonathan watched, he then took a step back and raised the barbed chains of his headdress, flailing and whipping them around in front of his face to direct a current of hot air from the fire into the hanging fabric. The whipping chains almost reminded Jonathan of an insect scanning the air with its antennae, scaled up to something larger than a man. It was a simultaneously whimsical and disconcerting sight.

“Say, Wamuu,” Speedwagon finally spoke, looking up from the fire at the near-naked goliath that stood whipping at the air beside him, “did you happen to notice the blood trail on the way out?”

“Of course.” Wamuu stepped around the side of the fire to dry the other side of the hanging cloak, the chains continuing to lash around his face and hair unabated as he moved. “I’m guessing the vampire that Jonathan injured in the stairwell did not flee back the way we came in?”

Jonathan looked warily back and forth between the two of them. He hadn’t noticed any blood trail himself, but then he had neither Speedwagon’s experience with furtive chases and escapes nor Wamuu’s ability to see in the dark. In response to Wamuu’s question, Speedwagon shook his head no.

“Vampire slaves do not run when their masters are in danger,” Wamuu said grimly as the chains continued their wild buzzing and whistling, “and killing Lamkin and destroying her mask should have slowed him down even then, on top of his missing leg. If we did not catch up to him during our exit, then he could not have been one of hers.”

“What do you mean by that?” Speedwagon asked.

“My source informed me that four stone masks had been brought to England. If they have all claimed their victims already, two of them could have started working together.”

Jonathan remembered something. “When I fought Lamkin,” he said, “she mentioned an ‘us.’ That could mean she knew another stone mask wearer, couldn’t it?”

Wamuu reached up and felt Jonathan’s coat, moving his fingers up and down for any remaining damp spots before unhooking it and walking back to the concrete piling to exchange it for his pants. “It sounds like it. If this is what it looks like, the third master vampire is going to be expecting us now. We will not have the element of surprise this time.”

He hung the pants up and raised his snaking chains again. As he began conjuring another stream of hot wind, Jonathan folded his arms over his mostly healed chest and sighed. “It’s fortunate I’ve found someone who can better help me prepare, then.”

“Yes,” Wamuu replied, that strange, subdued smile returning to his stony lips as his bronze antennae worked away, “very fortunate.”

Jonathan stared at the towering nightman in silence until he finished drying Jonathan’s pants and finally recovered his own sea-dampened cloak. He remembered seeing Wamuu smile like that once before, when Jonathan first used the ripple to heal himself in Clara’s brothel. Another thought came to Jonathan then; one he’d had several times before over the last several days, but this time – in conjunction with the thought of that secretive, almost gloating smile – it weighed on him much more heavily.

“Wamuu, why didn’t you take my mother’s mask by force? You knew I couldn’t have really stopped you, if you’d kept fighting after I blocked you the first time.”

Wamuu stopped his drying work and looked back down at his companion. His olive face, dappled in firelight and shadow, was expressionless now, as inscrutable as a stone statue’s.

“I will speak to your woman friend before answering that. Think of it as a penalty for not guarding your own words.”

Jonathan and Speedwagon watched in silence as Wamuu finished his work.

…

It was a clear, crisp afternoon. No new snow had fallen since the night before, and the pale sunlight made the deep, crunchy layer left on the back garden glow a reflected white. Jonathan stood by the snow-covered hedge wall separating the lawn from the flower court, watching his breath float away as he chuckled and shook his head.

“A hedge maze?” He repeated. “What do you suppose the gardeners would think if all of a sudden we told them to find room for a hedge maze?”

Erina raised her eyebrows at him as she turned back around. “Isn’t that what you’re paying them for?”

Jonathan squinted at her, placing a thoughtful hand on his chest and being rewarded with a painful itch for his trouble as he was reminded of the still-healing wound. Burns seemed to be more difficult to heal than other injuries, with or without the ripple. “Erina, weren’t you the one who taught me about other people’s feelings and why they’re important?”

Erina cocked her head, sardonic smile fading away. “You…actually remembered that?”

Jonathan blushed a little, the change in skin tone just barely visible over the cold induced redness. “I might not go so far as to call it a formative experience, but it was an important one for me.”

It was Erina’s turn to put a bemittened hand to her chest. “Oh.” She was silent for a moment. The two simply looking at each other. “Well, I suppose I’ve never been a gardener."

She smiled a little. Shyly, in a way she hadn’t since their first reunion at the hospital. Jonathan walked across the snow and, after hesitating for a moment, placed a hand on her shoulder. A moment later, she wrapped her own arm around his back. Their breaths rose as white fog, disappearing against the pale sky as it floated upward. Erina shuffled closer to Jonathan, so that their warm bodies were now pressed together through their winter coats. Jonathan lowered his own arm to encircle her own back in return. Several minutes passed in silence.

“We probably should start the lesson soon,” Jonathan finally said, smiling down at the lustrous face that was grinning up from against his chest.

“Yes, of course.” Erina pulled herself away and returned to Jonathan’s side. “I could feel how warm you’ve kept your fingers, earlier, even through your gloves. You cooled a little when we started talking, but I know, it’s hard to keep it going and have a conversation at the same time.”

“I can do both at once for a time, but yes, it does get exhausting after a few minutes.” It didn’t get nearly as exhausting as keeping the ripple breathing going while being chased around a dusty warehouse by a monster, but Jonathan wasn’t going to break Wamuu’s confidence again. He did, however, remember the subject he had wanted to raise to Erina and how he’d decided to broach it to avoid such a betrayal.

“After we’ve done some of the breathing exercises you spoke about, I was wondering if you could teach me something else. The man who activated me told me about something called the flow of power; sending ripple out of one’s body and into nearby objects. Do you know much about this?”

“Oh, yes,” Erina said, her face going from confused to understanding as he completed his explanation. “The monk called it the shifting of sand.”

Jonathan chuckled, raising his eyebrows a little. “Rather an opaque simile.”

Erina shook her head. “Not with the proper context. Here.”

She unwrapped her arm from around his waist and backed another few feet away through the snow. Standing straight, she began inhaling the rich, extra concentrated winter air through her mouth and pushing it out through her teeth. She spoke, haltingly, between the sharp exhalations.

“The sunlight touches the air, and wind is created. The wind blows across the surface of the water, and ripples are formed.”

Her breath deepened, and she waited a few more sharp exhalations before continuing, haltingly, her words rhythmic in a way that made Jonathan sure they had been designed to fit between such breaths. As she spoke, she pulled off her left mitten, leaving the fingers beneath it exposed.

“The ripples move across the water…and grow into waves…The waves approach the edge of the water…and crest,,,The crests flow up across the shore…and shift the sand from place to place as the ocean wills.”

She bent over forward sharply, and stabbed her left index and little fingers straight downward into the snow. The familiar skin-crawling static of the ripple swept across Jonathan’s body, followed half a second later by a little eruption of slush that flew up in Jonathan’s direction only to splatter across the chest and stomach of his coat.

Erina straightened back up, panting and red faced, but wearing an embarrassed grin behind her loosened blonde bangs. “I wanted to see if I could get your face from all the way over here. Oh well.” She giggled her mischievous giggle, and Jonathan’s body went even hotter than it had when they’d embraced.

“I’m sure it would have been perfectly droll,” Jonathan rolled his eyes and shook his head at her, but couldn’t help smiling as well, “but is there any chance you could tell me something more actionable?”

The clouds began to return, and the sun to dip lower behind them, but neither of them noticed the growing chill as they stretched and exercised so many muscles throughout the lesson, ripple flowing through their blood and out their fingers in turn as Jonathan followed her instructions and examples. More often than not now, he was turning a modest sized circle of snow into slush, and once he found the tunnel left by his retreating finger full of liquid water. He hadn’t noticed it at the time, but Erina excitedly informed him that the snow around him had bulged and trembled as he stabbed into it as well.

“Making it move in a certain direction is harder,” Erina panted, clutching her diaphragm as she recovered from their lengthy efforts. “It’s partly the direction of each finger, but there’s also a blood circulation component. Filling the right capillaries at exactly the perfect moment takes a lot of concentration, and fine muscle control, so you’ll need to practice manipulating your blood flow at least twice a day for…well, it took me three months to make any real progress.”

“I’ll certainly keep that in mind,” Jonathan panted back. He was much more recovered than Erina, thanks to either his stronger lungs or the stress testing his body had received the night before, but he had still worked up enough of a sweat to merit removing his overcoat. As they made their breathy way back toward the manor house, Jonathan said “Erina, the man I told you about says he’d like to meet you himself.”

“Oh?” She perked up for a moment, but then a wary look came over her. “The ‘night man’ who slays demons, you mean?”

Jonathan took a deep breath of the non-ripple variety. She had demanded to know more about his nocturnal activities and whether they had anything to do with how tired he’d looked when she arrived this afternoon, of course. Jonathan had simply told her that if they did, he’d be under oath not to tell her. He was just relieved she hadn’t asked if he was hurt after he truthfully told her that he was “alright.” If she’d demanded to see the half-healed burn scar on his chest, today’s meeting would have taken on a very different tone from the outset.

“The night man who may or may not slay demons. Yes. He told me that he wanted to meet you himself before allowing me to disclose everything.”

“I see.”

They stopped walking, holding position near the garden entrance. Erina looked down at the snow, deep in thought. When she looked up again, her face showed resolve.

“If blood-drinking monsters with a fatal ripple allergy really do exist, then they’ll continue existing whether or not I know about them.” She shook her head, hair still loose and messy from their exertions. “I still can’t believe it, even though I trust you Jonathan. But, well…yes, I’ll meet your night man.”

Jonathan didn’t know what he’d expected to feel, when and if she gave him that answer, but the emotion that surged through him now was relief. Keeping secrets from Erina, especially ones that she knew he was keeping – especially ones that made her fear for him – had been hurting him more than he realized. He smiled broadly as he looked down at her sunkissed face and fluttering bangs, and the memory of her body pressed against his returned to mind.

“I’m glad. I really have been wishing I could tell you everything.” He rested his hand on her shoulder again, and gently guided her to face him straight on.

“You really always have been such a strange adventure for me, Jonathan.” She laid her hands on either side of his undercoated chest and moved in again. She wasn’t quite smiling this time, but her face had a warm, wide-eyed concern. A kind of affection that Jonathan wasn’t sure he’d ever seen directed at him before. He lay his other hand on her opposite shoulder, and began craning his head downward.

Then, Erina froze, her eyes went wide, and she pulled back away. Confused, disappointed, and above all afraid he’d gone too far, Jonathan started to open his mouth to ask if everything was alright, but then saw that she was staring at something off to his left toward the manor. He looked up in the same direction and settled his eyes on the newcomer.

“JoJo,” Dio called out with a smile as he strode across the shallower snow that covered the paved garden path, “I was wondering what happened to you.” He stepped closer, and turned his winsome smile on Erina. Jonathan noticed Dio’s eyebrows lowering just a hundredth of an inch as he spoke to her. “And to whom do I owe the pleasure of meeting?”

Erina stared at him silently. Coldly. Jonathan took a step toward his foster brother, taking in a deep breath that he realized after the fact had just a touch of the ripple-to-waves depth to it and straightening up. “Good afternoon, Dio. Do you remember Erina Pendelton?”

Jonathan felt his own eyes narrow a little, and his muscles tense up. What was getting into him? He had only barely managed to keep that question from sounding like a challenge to duel.

Dio raised one golden eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Pendleton…”

Jonathan’s fingers balled into fists. The image came, unbidden, of Dio bleeding as he lay in the snow right in front of him. He kept his face neutral, but it was a challenge.

“…oh, Erina, from when we were all children! You and JoJo were almost inseparable, of course.” He shook his face and chuckled fondly at the memory.

Erina’s face went from icy to almost arctic. Jonathan spoke very slowly, keeping his voice carefully low and measured. “Yes. We were.”

Dio gave Jonathan an inquisitive look. Was there an undertone of mockery there? Could he trust his own senses, or judgement? “Well,” Dio said, turning back to Erina while watching Jonathan out of the corner of his eye, “this is a surprise.”

“A pleasant one?” Erina spoke for the first time, her voice as rigid as her expression.

Dio shrugged, and redoubled his smile. “I don’t recall us ever speaking much, sad to say mademoiselle. But I’m sure we’ll be running into each other again, now that you’re back?”

Jonathan’s heartbeat picked up. The muscles in his face started to twitch. Erina shrugged, and said nothing, her eyes still locked unblinkingly on Dio’s.

“I didn’t think you’d be out here on such a cold day,” Jonathan said.

“Nor I you.” He reached up and stroked one of his yellow bangs back into place. “I was a little worried when I didn’t find you in the pantries at this hour, until I saw you out here from the window.”

“I suppose I’m not surprised,” Erina replied, voice still emotionless, “a body like this one takes a lot to maintain.” She reached up and patted Jonathan on the bicep.

Dio paused. The smile remained on his pouty lips, but it was frozen in place, like a leftover that hadn’t yet been cleared away. “Well,” he said, bowing his head a little toward Erina, “I’d be careful with this one, JoJo. I fear this young lady might be harboring some impure intentions toward you.”

Jonathan’s mouth fell open. Dio laughed, and patted Jonathan on the shoulder. “Calm down, I was only joking.” He looked back and forth between them and gave Jonathan a skeptical shrug. “Well, I’m glad everything is alright. I suppose I’ll get myself back into the warmth now. Farewell.”

Jonathan nodded his head a little as a goodbye. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Erina did the same. Dio graced them with one last disarming smile before turning around and strolling back toward the manor.

…

Dio locked the door to his room behind him, and sat down on his bed. Jonathan Joestar was, as he always had been, a man of questionable tastes. Between the alcohol he gulped down without care at every other social function, the useless degree he’d insisted on in the face of so many more lucrative and empowering options, and the steaks he insisted on eating so rare that Dio swore the cows could still feel him biting into them, JoJo’s lack of respect for the decorum he’d been lucky enough to be born into was something Dio had forced himself to mostly get used to. Even for him though, this was just embarrassing.

He did admire Erina Pendleton’s tenacity, he was forced to admit. Nearly seven years later, and she was still ready to go right back to work digging at the same gold mine where she’d left off. Good instincts, and an even better memory. Fortunately, what she had in persistence, she lacked in subtlety. The sight of her rubbing that sticky paw of hers across his foster brother’s muscles through that thin undercoat…that had just been completely shameless.

He swept his bangs back behind his ears, before sighing and leaning forward to hold his chin in his hands. Perhaps something had gotten into JoJo after all, these last few months. Running off with their rugby teammates more and more often while people who actually cared about their academics remained dutifully on campus. Taking meals with people who Dio didn’t even know the names of. Somehow meeting up with the Pendleton girl again, without a word to anyone about it. And, of course, there was the matter of Speedwagon and Gabriel.

For the dozenth, perhaps hundredth, time since his early morning drink with JoJo the week prior, Dio shook his head in wordless, half-disbelieving confusion. That JoJo had even halfway fallen for that yarn the big foreign oaf spun for him was bizarre enough. That he’d been slipping away from the manor to visit him and his malodorous London-born companion – at least twice so far, if Dio wasn’t mistaken – for wholly unexplained reasons, Dio was at a complete loss to explain. He remembered the text of the letter he’d found left absentmindedly on his foster brother’s unkempt desk, yesterday evening.
Speedwagon found the next target in Brighton. Meet at the new All Saints’ Church between nine and ten tomorrow night. Bring some money.


Jonathan had indeed vanished the previous night, and slept until the afternoon today according to the butler. And yet, the stone mask that the pair had been after that first night was still in JoJo’s room sitting right beside the letter, and JoJo had returned alive and – as far as Dio could tell – unrobbed. Perhaps this was part of a long con, getting JoJo to give them payments of increasing size over time as they drew him into whatever wild fantasy they’d concocted about the old relic. But somehow, Dio didn’t think that that was the case either. Bring “some” money. Not a specific amount. Phrased in a way that made it seem like bringing any to one of their meetings was an exception rather than the rule.

Truth be told, it had been years since Dio had read the Joestars’ mail with any regularity. He occasionally read one of George’s periodicals or JoJo’s American correspondence just to make sure he wasn’t losing his touch (and sure enough, neither of them had suspected a thing since he was sixteen), but JoJo’s recent behavior had gotten him a bit more concerned. It was a skill he’d first practiced in his childhood, and how he’d learned about the specifics of the debt the Joestars owed to his father. Sure, the old man had bragged every other night, with words stinking of alcohol, cough syrup, and his own putrid, maggoty breath, of how “the Duke of Hampshire” owed him his life AND the life of his brat, and how any day now he would collect on the rest of that debt and get them out of Ogre Street for good. Bits and pieces of good fortune did seem to come their way more often than any of the neighbors, but they all disappeared down his father’s throat as liquor, into the pockets of the whores he slipped away to every other week, or into the coffers of the Scotland Yard when they raided that hotel he had just opened and found something that led to its immediate closure (and the man’s third jail sentence), that Dio’s mother had never been quite sure if it – or the duke – ever actually existed at all. Among the first books that Dio had gotten his hands on when he was teaching himself to read at age six was a peerage of England’s nobility, in which he’d been only moderately surprised to discover that there had never been a duke in Hampshire.

His surprise had therefore been much more genuine five years later, when he discovered that Baron George Joestar did indeed exist, though his father evidently couldn’t be bothered to remember his actual title. And thus it was that Dio had decided that keeping an eye on his family’s letters would not be a skill he could afford to let go. This had been the moment, after all, that preceded his father falling ill, and Dio being adopted by the Joestars upon his death a year after.

Of course, another hard lesson that Dio had learned at around that time, and this had been a much more nearly disastrous thing, was the importance of self control. He knew he’d been slipping more and more often, now that he was so far along in his plan, so close to finally reaching freedom, and suddenly having to deal with JoJo getting stranger and more erratic. First the foolishness he’d let himself blindly thrash into, with trying to guide the robbers into a confrontation with JoJo that he didn’t really want, and now with how easily he’d let the Pendleton girl rattle him. This was the second time that bitch had managed to get under his skin, and the last time it happened…well.

Dio raised a hand to his jaw and nose, rubbing them in the memory of pain.

Well. It had nearly been disastrous.

…

The girl was walking back across the meadow toward Aldershot, her bright yellow hair standing out against the greens and reds of the autumn field. He narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t yet sure if she was a knowing player of the game like himself, competing with forethought and guile for the Joestar gold, or just another dumb whore like the dozens his father had gone through. It wasn’t a chance he could afford to take, though.

He looked back at the two other boys who he’d brought here after searching for and failing to find JoJo for his next scheduled beating, and happening into that tacky heart carved into the tree he often sat in. A heart with the names “JoJo” and “Erina” engraved within. That had been an unpleasant shock to Dio’s circulation. He’d managed to strip away JoJo’s burgeoning social circle, drive a wedge between him and his father, make him the laughingstock of the boxing club he’d been so eager to join. Dio was sure it would only be until Christmas, or possibly Easter at the latest, before his foster brother decided to just get the message, give up, and leave the Joestar estate to someone who’d actually worked for it. But then, out of nowhere, the oaf had found something new to live for. Something he’d hidden away from Dio, and all but actively taunted him with. On the one hand, Dio was relieved to have finally solved the mystery. On the other…well, if this “Erina” really did know what she was doing, he might have to escalate much further to deal with the threat.

Hopefully, she’d turn out to really just be a dumb whore after all, and getting rid of her wouldn’t require any more effort or risk than what he was already planning.

“Come on,” he said to the other two, waving them on out from under the shadow of the big maple tree they’d been watching from under, affecting the nonchalant and slightly mischievous smile that he always did when pulling them along in his wake. By the time the flaxen-haired girl reached the little copse of elm trees that lay just before the hills that hid her hometown from view, the three of them were waiting for her near the mud puddle sheltered by the roots. She stopped when she saw the three boys, her body stiffening under her pale blue dress and her arms moving in front of her.

“Good afternoon,” Dio said with a sweeping, only ambiguously irreverent bow and flourish.

The girl bowed her head slightly back. “Afternoon,” she said quietly, warily. She spoke to him, but her eyes were mostly on the two companions who stood at his flanks. Some sort of history, there? Regardless, it irritated him. He was the one talking to her. He was the one who brought the other two boys here in the first place. He cleared his throat rather sharply to force her attention back on him.

“Would you happen to be named Erina?” He already knew that she was, of course. The other boys had put her description to the name as soon as they heard it.

The girl’s blue eyes narrowed, and her brows rose. “Yes.” Her voice was high strung. Combative. “Why?”

Dio smiled and shook his head, tossing his long golden bangs back over his ear as he made eye contact with each grinning companion before returning his attention to her. “I’ve been looking for an Erina. It seems someone has defaced an innocent tree with that name, and I’ve been forced to suspect my dear foster brother Jonathan.”

Her eyes narrowed harder. Her lips tightened. “Dio,” she whispered, making the name sound like an accusation. She intoned it like “rat” or “cockroach.” He felt his blood running hot, but forced himself to keep his cool. He continued.

“At your service, mademoiselle. I’ve come to do you a favor, as a matter of fact.”

He strode forward, grabbing her around the shoulders before she could run away. She was strong, for a girl, but none of these country children had been in a quarter as many fights as Dio had in his thirteen years of life, or ever been forced to run nearly as fast. As she thrashed against his hands, he yanked her closer and took one of them off her shoulder to grab her by the hair, pulling it back and forcing her head to tilt up toward his with a pained gasp.

“Dear God!” one of the boys hollered in half-uncomfortable admiration, “Is he actually going to do it?”

Dio let his actions answer for him. Pulling Erina’s hair further back so that her mouth shot open in a squeal of pain, he leaned his own body into hers and pressed his lips against her own.

…

She tried to scream, but his lips were stuffing hers and muffling the sound, the acrid taste of him seeping into her mouth while he held her by the shoulder and hair. Fear giving way to rage, she pushed her head forward into his, trying to snap her teeth together around the tip of the slimy tongue that was pulling at the inside of her lips, but his hand just yanked her hair back, making her teeth close just short of their mark. The corners of his lips turned up, without his mouth ever pulling itself out of hers, and his eyes flashed. Laughing at her without making a sound. Mocking her for even thinking she could fight back.

She heard Garfunkel and Oats laughing and cheering. She’d managed to avoid those two for months, ever since they cornered her near the bridge, pulled her rag doll out of her hands, and removed its clothing while grinning at her suggestively. At the time, she’d almost pitied them more than fearing them. Now, she could feel their eyes feasting on her as Dio held her in place, hear their cries of triumph and taboo excitement, as their new hero sucked almost casually on her paralyzed mouth. Like vultures picking at an animal they’d long been watching that was finally vulnerable.

Erina realized, then, that she could die. If Dio wanted to, he could choke her, or twist her neck. He could do it on a spur of the moment inspiration. She would only live past this day if he decided to let her live. And somehow, she knew that he wanted her to know that.

Suddenly determined not to just let herself be butchered like a lamb if he decided to do that, she fumbled for his neck and grabbed at it, seeking purchase with her fingernails and digging in deep and scratching when she did. If she was causing him any pain, he didn’t show it. Beginning to feel faint for lack of air, she brought her hands down and grabbed at his collar, trying to drag his head away from hers. He pulled her hair harder again, punitively, and she almost gagged as his tongue pushed around inside her lips again. She heard the sound of tearing cloth, and felt her hands pull away from his skin, but still he didn’t let her go.

It wasn’t until she was dizzy, sure she would suffocate soon, that Dio abruptly pulled back his mouth and released her, letting her slump to the ground in a heap.

“Why, you’ve ruined my collar,” his smooth, mocking voice fell back over her as she coughed and spat the taste of him out, burying her face in the grass as the first tears began stinging their way out of her eyes, “don’t tell me you do that when JoJo kisses you, do you?”

She gasped, freezing in place mid-twitch. She hoped he wouldn’t be able to divine the reason behind it, but he did almost immediately.

“Why…you hadn’t even kissed him yet at all, had you? Could it be that…I was your very first?”

As the other two babbled and whispered excitedly to each other at the edge of her consciousness, Erina forced her chin up out of her arms. Hearing him mock and taunt her again took the immediate physical fear away, and allowed anger to rise back up in its wake. Not just anger. There was another emotion mixed with it, one she’d never experienced before, but knew as soon as she felt it. Hate.

Peering around just above the grass, her blurry, saltwater-filled eyes found the puddle of muddy water nestled among the crowded tree roots, in the grassless patch at the center of the copse just a few feet away. It was two days since the last rain, and the water had begun to turn green with algae and its surface to quiver with the movements of gnats and mosquitoes. Drawing a damp, sniffly breath in through her nose, Erina dragged herself on her hands and stomach toward the puddle.

“Wait, what is she doing?” Garfunkel’s voice called out, at the edge of her consciousness. Almost hissing with rage and white hot hatred, she brought her face to the muddy, slime-tainted water, braced herself, and took as much of it as she could into her mouth.

“What the…?”

She swished the mud and bitter algae back and forth in her mouth, making sure to raise herself up on her knees so Dio could see what she was doing, before spitting it back into the puddle.

“Hey, um, you know,” Oats’ uncertain voice rose up from the quiet murmurs, “the river’s right over there. There’s cleaner water if you-” his voice was cut off, as if by a hand pressed forcefully over his mouth. Not looking at any of them, Erina just leaned back down to the pond, took another mouthful, and began washing her mouth with it again.

There was dead silence, but for the humming of the gnats and mosquitoes, as she rinsed her mouth with the second vile gulp, and then only a tiny splash as she spat it out again. The heavy silence returned, after that. A cold silence. Erina began to get back to her feet, when she heard his footsteps come charging toward her.

“YOU WHORE!”

Dio’s foot slammed into her side, knocking the wind out of her and throwing her into the mud puddle with a sickly splash. A moment later, he raised it again and stomped on her chest with a savage, inarticulate roar, turning her torso into solid pain and making her see stars.

One of the others said something, then. Dio said something back. Erina just rolled over on her side and covered her face until the trio had left.

…

She stood before the inner gate, breathing tight, controlled breaths. More than keeping the winter chill away, the ripple-to-waves rhythm kept her even. Ever since Swami Tonpetti had taught it to her, she’d found her breathing shifting into it whenever she was too stressed or angry to concentrate, and it usually helped her find her center again. Jonathan stood beside her, his face expressionless, but his eyes harder and colder than she’d ever seen them before, or even imagined that they could turn.

“That was just three months before we left for India,” she concluded. “I did want to be with you again, in that time, but.”

She swallowed, her face burning with more than just ripple heat. She was unable to meet Jonathan’s gaze.

“I told you in the letters, I didn’t blame you,” Jonathan finally said. “I might not have known exactly what he did, but I knew it had to be…something like that.”

Silence reigned for the next several moments. Jonathan put his hand on her shoulder. She placed her own hand atop it, squeezing and enjoying its warmth.

“I beat him half unconscious, the day after.”

Erina looked up at him, the ashamed flush beginning to drain away. “I remember you wrote about that.” She managed a halfhearted smile. “Well, you weren’t specific, but I knew it had to be something like that.”

Jonathan smiled, half grimly, half ashamedly himself. “He’d always been stronger and faster than me, until I started that growth spurt right around the time your family departed. But when I found out he’d done whatever it was he’d done to you, I…well, I suppose it was a matter of motivation. I fractured his jaw, and nearly broke his nose. Father grounded me and assigned me double lessons for a month afterward, but I didn’t regret it for a moment of that time.”

She watched him let out another white cloudy breath that drifted away above the snowy grounds. The shape of his lips rippling, round and smooth, below his sculpted nose and wide, troubled eyes.

“I suppose that may have been what taught him his lesson,” Jonathan continued, seeming to be thinking aloud. “It was a long time before we could be proper brothers, but after that day he stopped doing any of the things he’d been doing before.”

Another pause, before he continued.

“He’d just come from the worst part of London, where he’d lived all his life until then. I suppose it just took him some time and beatings to learn there was any other way to act.”

Erina looked at him quizzically. His face was stolid, but his voice was…hesitant. As if he was trying to convince himself as much as her. Or perhaps, as if something had recently shaken a strongly held belief of his.

“No,” Erina said.

Jonathan cocked his narrow, fair skinned head in her direction. “What do you mean?”

She looked back at the looming, window-studded walls of Joestar Manor, along the path that Dio had taken back to the door. The word he’d used when he greeted her just now, delivered in that gloating, knowing tone of voice. Mademoiselle.

“I don’t think he ever changed at all.”




TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[Kiarael]

Very well written, and I don't want to read it again anytime soon.

Changing media can really change the whole context and impact of a scene, huh?

 

[MagnificentLilyWitch]

It is really illustrative of just how broken Dio is that he can only understand others as being either fellow victims (though I'm sure he would never admit to being one) or fellow abusers. No one can escape the cycle of violence in Dio's world except through being the one at the top.


Jojo, Speedwagon and Erina continue to be incredibly cute together. I'm looking forward to Rob and Erina meeting, I figure they're either going to hit it off or peg each other as love rivals right away. I'm kind of hoping for a lovechain or ploycule ending at this point though.


The Nightmens (Nightpeoples?) ways of dealing with extreme emotions is nice to see again.


Erina continues to be the most badass character. Your prose and the internal perspective makes the assault and puddle water even more raw and uncomfortable.

 

[Leila Hann]

8. She’s Got A Way​

The sounds of the blizzard outside and the crackling fire on the hearth were the only ones in the Pendleton dining room as four of them stared, and one of them ate. He hadn’t laid so much as an olive skinned finger on the bread, potatoes, or beans, but half the blood sausage had disappeared before any of the others had gotten more than a bite. Jonathan stared nervously down at his mostly finished plate of baked potatoes. Erina’s eyes shifted nervously back and forth between him, and the literal bloodthirsty giant. Doctor Thomson and Clementine Pendleton’s eyes were glued, wide and unblinking, on the stranger as he ate.

“Are you certain you wouldn’t like to remove your hat at the table?” Dr. Pendleton asked, adjusting his glasses and eyeing the bronze and ivory headdress that crowned Wamuu’s cropped yellow hair with mixed fascination and offense.

“He can’t, I’m afraid,” Jonathan looked sheepishly up from his plate. “It’s…well, it’s an artifact of his people and…”

His voice grew quieter as he spoke, and a faint red flush showed itself in his cheeks. Erina and her father were both starting to open their mouths when Wamuu finished swallowing his latest mouthful and spoke first. “What Jonathan means is that my people have a religious prohibition against removing our head coverings while at meals. I understand that this is against the local customs. You will have to forgive me.”

“Hmm.” Doctor Pendleton looked at his wife. Clementine looked back at him, and then gave their daughter a distinctly unamused stare before saying “Don’t worry, Mr. Wamuu. We understand.”

Wamuu’s lips turned upward just the smallest amount before he returned to his blood sausage. The Pendletons stared at him for another long moment before Clementine finally spoke to Jonathan again. “Erina seemed rather put out the last time she returned from your home, Mr. Joestar. I’m sure you understand why we wanted to meet you again ourselves, considering.”

Erina sighed loudly. “I told you and papa both, Jonathan and I had a scare from some strangers on the way back. There’s nothing wrong.”

“Still,” the doctor replied, “I think your mother and I deserve to know what kind of company you’ve begun keeping.” He sent another wary look in Wamuu’s direction. Wamuu didn’t seem to notice. “Especially after that scare you gave us in Bengal.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, I had to go through with that to learn that healing technique!”

“Yes, indeed,” Thomson raised his graying eyebrows as he turned his plump, reddish face toward his daughter, “that extraordinarily pretty and long haired young European man you were running around with afterward was just another Hindu monk, I’m certain.”

Erina’s eyes flashed. “I’m terribly sorry, papa,” she said, her voice rising as she placed a hand on either side of her plate, “but I will not allow you to cast such aspersions on Swami Straizo. He sought Master Tonpetti out just as I did.”

“And had you coughing up blood with every other breath for how many days, again?”

Erina clenched her teeth. “Do we really need to repeat this argument right at this second?”

Jonathan raised himself up a little in his seat. “Ah, would you please pass the beans back this way, Mrs. Pendleton?” He was relieved to see that this reminder of his presence diffused the doctor’s next reply. Clementine smiled mechanically, and passed the steaming bowl.

“I don’t believe we’ve asked you yet,” the older woman said, turning back to Wamuu after she’d passed the legumes, “how did you come to meet Mr. Joestar?”

Wamuu repeated his faint smile. “Jonathan is a scholar of American archaeology. A mutual acquaintance of ours at his academy referred him to me, since his studies concerned my tribe’s history.”

“Fascinating,” Thomson said. Jonathan could see more questions welling up behind the doctor’s eyes, and behind those of his wife as well. So, it seemed, did Erina, as she spoke up before he could.

“Well, I’ve finished eating. If you don’t mind, I think the guests and I could do with cooling off a bit.” She pushed back her chair and stood up.

Jonathan stood up after her. “Yes, I’ve eaten quite enough as well. Thank you kindly, Doctor and Mrs. Pendleton, it was all delicious.”

Wamuu threw the last chunk of blood sausage into his mouth before standing up, almost knocking his chair over in the process and pulling his hood back up over his circlet, horn, and chains. “Thank you. It was nice meeting you.” He bowed his head a little, and then turned and led the way to the hall, opening the front door around the corner to reveal the howling wind and buzzing swarm of massive snowflakes beyond.

“But…the weather…” Doctor Thomson Pendleton protested, starting to rise himself as his daughter followed him into the hall.

Erina scoffed as she grabbed her cloak and umbrella from the hooks beside the door. “Oh for goodness’ sake, we all dealt with much worse in the peaks. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Love you both.”

She followed Wamuu out into the churning white storm. Jonathan, after putting on his own overcoat and giving an apologetic smile to Erina’s parents, exited onto the Aldershot street as well and closed the wooden door behind them. The bitter cold forced its way into his sleeves and hood, but after the first two or three ripple breaths the unpleasant feeling was pushed back away.

“I’m sorry you two needed to see that,” Erina huffed between sharp, carefully regulated breaths of her own, “They insisted.”

“Well,” Jonathan forced a smile as he put a hand on her shoulder, “at least they care?” He gave Wamuu a meaningful look out the corner of his eye. Wamuu looked bemused for a moment, and then, after sighing to himself a little, grudgingly nodded.

“Yes, I suppose they at least do that,” Erina took a ripple breath in and forced it out before leading them up the billowing, nearly empty street. Putting her own arm around Jonathan’s, she looked over at the huge man walking alongside them herself. “So, you’re the ‘night man’ who wants to speak with me?”

Wamuu was expressionless as he replied, still walking alongside them, “I am. And you’re the daywoman who I am told channels the ripple.”

“Day woman?” She squinted at him from under the umbrella she held over her and Jonathan’s heads.

“Yes. Though, I am skeptical about the ripple use. You’re smaller than most who can channel it.”

“Wamuu, I told you-” Jonathan started to say indignantly, voice raised a little, but Erina sped up herself and turned around to block Wamuu off, staring up at his massive face as she stood in the ankle-deep snow right in his path. Jonathan took a moment to adjust to the renewed snowfall as the umbrella followed its holder.

“I’ve heard that enough times to be quite tired of it. If you really don’t believe me, even after hearing my dear papa gleefully recount what I went through for it, then I’ll have to just show you.”

“Erina, no!” Jonathan tried to interpose himself, heart rising up in his chest in alarm as he saw her extend the fingers of her left hand and heard her pull in her deepest breath yet. As he put his hand on her, he turned his head to give Wamuu a warning look, but what he saw stopped him in place.

Wamuu was smiling.

No, not smiling. He was grinning, in a way Jonathan had only seen him do once before, under the pier at Brighton before his fainting spell.

“You can back away, Jonathan,” Wamuu said, eyes locked on the umbrella-wielding woman in front of him, grin unchanging. “I asked her to prove herself, and she will.”

“Wait,” Erina said, eyelids narrowing warily and fingers starting to move back out of flow-of-power position, “what do you-”

Bronze, flail-tipped chains flashed out of Wamuu’s hood and cut through the falling snow, spinning like near-invisible propellers with a buzz that drowned out the snowstorm and Erina’s gasp of surprise alike. The wind around them changed course, blowing out from in front of Wamuu’s gold-studded face and sending the snowflakes shooting away over their heads as they were lifted above the howling, buzzing vortex.

Erina’s mouth dropped open. Her eyes, which had been narrowed in suspicion, went the same shape. “How…”

“Strike me with your ripples, Erina Pendleton,” Wamuu said, his voice rising above the buzzing and the howling, “or never see me again, and spend the rest of your life mystified.”

Jonathan gave Wamuu an outraged glare, but the nightman just met his gaze with a stony blue impassivity before returning his attention to Erina. He was serious, Jonathan was sure. Despite the exhilarated smile, he was completely serious about this.

After looking momentarily at Jonathan for reassurance, and receiving the most encouraging smile he could manage as he shielded his eyes from the wind with his hands, Erina knelt down, left arm raised before her billowing hair to shield her own face a little, and grabbed the handle of her umbrella from the snow where it had been blown out of her hands. Turning her back to Wamuu and his whirling, wind-launching chains, she closed the umbrella and then turned back around to face him. She sucked in a deep breath, forced it out sharply, and then jabbed the umbrella out in front of her chest and opened it in the same motion. Jonathan was sure it would catch the wind again and either be blown back out of her grasp or pull her away down the street with it, but it did neither. The warm static of the ripple flowed out from the expanding brim, and the wind striking Jonathan’s face began hitting him harder as part of it was repelled by Erina’s bumbershoot and redirected all around her. She bent her knees and dug her boots into the snow, breathing rhythmically behind her ripple-charged shield, and took a difficult step toward Wamuu.

The nightman grinned wider, and suddenly dashed to the side, almost faster than Jonathan could track with his eyes being buffeted by the wind as they were. Erina turned after him, but was a second too slow. As Wamuu’s wind gust changed direction, it caught the inside of the umbrella, and her arms were yanked back over her shoulder. Half a heartbeat later, with a startled shriek, Erina was lifted into the air and sent flying back down the street past shuttered windows and snow-covered walls. Running after her, beginning to wonder if he had fallen asleep at the Pendleton dinner table and this was his brain punishing him for all the stress he’d been placing it under, Jonathan grabbed her by the ankle before she could make it more than one door away. He heard her grunt in surprise or pain as he did, but it gave her the moment she needed to get her other leg under her and close the umbrella, so that Jonathan could wrap his arms around her and lower her back onto her feet.

Jonathan shot an acidic glare up the dark, nighttime street against the barrage of wind and snow. The hulking silhouette on the other side of it remained in place, arms folded, motionless but for the whirling chains and billowing cloak.

“Are you alright?” He asked, looking back at the frazzled and snow-covered Erina while still keeping an eye on the shrouded figure of Wamuu.

“I’ll check after I’ve gotten him.”

And, with those words, she was running straight back at Wamuu, umbrella closed and pointed out in front of her to minimize the wind resistance. Jonathan hurried back after her. Just as he was getting close enough to see the little streetlight that made it through the blizzard reflecting off of Wamuu’s ear and lip rings again, Erina dove into the snow, umbrella in front of her, cutting through the gale and leaving a trail across the little drifts as she slid toward the nightman’s feet. The tip of her umbrella stopped just a few inches short of Wamuu’s boot. He heard Wamuu grunt in pain, and suddenly the assault ended, leaving only the natural wind and snowflakes drifting down the street as if nothing had happened.

“Well done.”

Jonathan came over to Erina and knelt down, taking her by the arm and shoulder and helping her out of the snow and back to her feet. She was panting, too exhausted for ripple-to-waves breathing, but when she blinked the snow out of her eyes they were as sharp and alert as ever.

“Was this really necessary?” Jonathan asked, glaring at Wamuu as he helped push Erina’s wet and snow-flecked hair back into place and retrieved her umbrella for her.

“Yes.”

As Erina recovered, a look of bewilderment came over her as she looked down at Wamuu’s feet and then back up at his face as he replaced his cowl. “Did that…hurt you…somehow?”

Wamuu smiled again. “Just a skin deep burn. Jonathan did much more damage.” He paused a moment before following that with “But I’m impressed you could do even that, with such small lungs and little blood. Fortifying the air around the umbrella especially. You have a spirit much greater than your size.”

Erina shook her head, seeming to not register the compliment. “I can’t burn a living creature with the ripple. Only the most experienced monks could do that, and only after spending minutes building the waves.” She looked down at the snow, and then, after a moment, up again, the confusion in her eyes giving way to wonder. “Night man. What does that mean?”

Wamuu took a step closer, putting both her and Jonathan within a couple of feet. “What did the monks teach you about where the ripples come from?”

Remembering how he had chosen to be told about the masks rather than the ripple back at Clara’s after Wamuu had stabbed his diaphragm, and that he hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask again after the Brighton incident, Jonathan reluctantly stopped being outraged on Erina’s behalf and listened to her answer. “There’s something in the sun that releases them. They wash down with the light, and get caught in the air as it passes through. When we breathe, the ripples pass on from the air and into our blood. Our bodies have learned to naturally benefit from it, and with the right kind of breathing and movements it can be made to do much more.”

Wamuu nodded. “That’s true for daymen, and most plants and animals. For my kind, it’s food.”

Erina blinked. Repeatedly. “Just for the sake of my scientific curiosity, would you care to explain that statement?”

“Did they tell you why the first thing you could do after they activated you was accelerate your body’s healing?” Erina shook her head. Wamuu nodded, and continued. “When the ripples pass through your blood and flesh, part of their force is left behind, for a while. It’s not just food and oxygen that gives your bodies their vitality. Especially for healing, and for thinking.”

“Well, they did tell me that much,” Erina interjected.

“I thought they would have. Our bodies are different from yours. We digest that energy from the meat and blood we eat. It’s the only way we can absorb the ripple, and unlike you we’d starve to death without it.”

The wind blew noisily along the drifty white street. Erina’s expression was more bewildered than he’d ever seen it. He supposed he would have looked the same, had he been told of Wamuu’s people and been made to believe it without first seeing vampires in the flesh. He wasn’t sure he understood the significance of what Wamuu was saying now, about digesting the ripple out of meat and blood, but if Erina’s face was anything to go by it wasn’t nothing. “I suppose that’s where your fondness for meat on the…shall we say…rarer side comes from, then?” he interjected.

Wamuu nodded. “The fresher the better. We need the same nutrients you do, and we get more of that from cooking. To get the most ripple in the form our bodies can use it though, there’s nothing like alive and raw.” He then gestured down at his burned toes. “But if we ever touch the ripples in their raw form, our flesh tries to absorb it all, and can’t deal with it. There’s no way for us to shut it out, even as we overheat and burn. Direct sunlight would kill me.”

Erina took a step backward. Jonathan couldn’t blame her. She looked at him, almost desperately. All he could do was nod his head in grave assent.

“You’re not human at all, Mr. Wamuu,” she said.

Wamuu’s faint semi-smile returned. “That’s a matter of perspective.”

…​

“The Brighton Massacre was you? And you killed Jack the Ripper?”

“Oh…yes, I suppose the papers must have covered Brighton by now,” Jonathan said, sighing heavily, “I haven’t had time to read the news since then.”

The last few logs burned away in the fireplace as the three of them sat around the dining room table. Doctor and Mrs. Pendleton had retired for the night, after Erina and the guests had returned – shivering, sopping wet, and uncommunicative – from their excursion and helped with the washing up as promised.

“And there’s two more masks in England. Besides your mother’s, which you…well, disabled?”

“That’s what I’ve been told,” Jonathan said, leaning back and indicating Wamuu across the table from them. Wamuu simply nodded yes.

For a while, Erina was silent, her forget-me-not blue eyes downcast in contemplation. Then, she said “well, I don’t get that much time to myself. But I’d like to come along next time if I can.”

Wamuu nodded his head. “You may.”

“Erina, wait,” Jonathan placed his hand on her shoulder, once again feeling like he didn’t even know Wamuu, “this is dangerous! If we’d been less lucky Speedwagon or I could have easily died by now. If something happened to you, I would-”

“How do you think I’ve been feeling since you didn’t tell me about how you’re not fighting the vampires that don’t exist? Is it fine for me to be worried, but not for you?”

Jonathan shook his head. “I’d rather you be worried than dead. How much experience do you have fighting?” He paused for a moment, and a thought came to him that comforted him even though it went against everything he had grown up believing. “Or…did the monks teach you, perhaps?”

She let her face fall a little. Her hand rose to the scarf she had around her neck. “No. They had their martial art they practiced using the ripple. They called it sendo. I…well, they did offer to teach me when I’d learned more, in case the rakshasas attacked me. I didn’t stay with them long enough, though, and…well, I already told you Jonathan, I thought the vampires and demons were just superstition until the day before yesterday.”

“That scarf is dyed with beetle pigment,” Wamuu suddenly interjected, “I thought so.”

Erina looked from Jonathan to Wamuu, surprised. “How did you know?”

“You put your hand on it when Jonathan asked you about your ripple training.” His not-quite-smile came back to him. “You didn’t believe in the vampires, but when one of the monks offered you that scarf and told you to use it if one attacked, you accepted it to be polite.”

Erina’s mouth opened and then closed again. The hand on the scarf rose up to cover it. Wamuu looked pensive. “I haven’t been in Asia for a long time. I’m surprised they’re still using the Chinese name for that martial art in the Sanskrit regions. But they’d invented those fabric weapons the last time I was there, and I recognized the shade of crimson.”

Jonathan was at least as confused as Erina looked. “What about the dye makes it a weapon?”

“I told you that the ripples flow more easily through living material, or material that once lived. Some animals and plants are more adapted to using them than others, and the insects they extract that dye from are some of the most efficient. Erina’s scarf can carry a flow of power almost as well as her own finger.” He gave Jonathan a strange look. “There’s another insect in my homeland with similar properties, that your own tribe seems to like the color of. Those curtains at your home wouldn’t make bad weapons if you tore off a strip.”

The thought of the plain old carmine curtains that had decorated Joestar manor’s lower floor and bedrooms since before Jonathan could remember being magical was somehow harder to wrap his mind around than his mother’s mask. Jonathan stopped that train of thought though. No, not magical. From what Wamuu had said tonight about the ripples of the sun, either they were no more magic than oxygen and water, or else all life on earth was magical. This isn’t a new world. This is the world we’ve always lived in. Still, another thought did come to him.

“You were paying that much attention to the curtains that night?”

Wamuu looked at him out of the corners of his eyes. “Speedwagon and I went there to steal.”

“Wait…you what?” Erina stared at him, half incredulous and half accusatory.

“It’s a long story,” Jonathan breathed out, looking down at the table.

Erina looked from one of the men to the other, before shaking her head with a sigh. “Never mind then. When are we going out after the next vampire?”

“You just said you’ve never fought before,” Jonathan challenged. Erina looked conflicted, for a moment, before replying.

“No, but is there anyone else who can heal you if your lungs are hurt, or if you lose consciousness?” She looked back at Wamuu. “Can you or this Speedwagon person do that?”

“I can’t,” Wamuu replied. “Speedwagon might be able to. He’s healing from his own ripple activation right now. But if all three of us will be fighting, you and he could use someone else to heal you if things go badly and I’m forced to carry you out.”

Not since he had caught him victimizing his foster brother had Jonathan so wanted to punch Wamuu in his blue-painted and gold-studded face. He glared at him, his eyes fiery. Wamuu just folded his massive arms over his chest. “Having another ripple user nearby who I know where to find would be the smart thing to do. That’s the truth.”

Erina nodded her head, hands going back to her crimson scarf. Jonathan tried to think of an argument, but the fact was that in terms of pure tactical thinking, Wamuu was correct. The thought of Erina anywhere near a vampire wasn’t one that sat right with him, but he remembered Lamkin’s lair in the hospital basement and what he had thought after the battle. This was always our world. No one was ever safe. That hospital could have just as easily been hers, and father’s.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to live with the worry just like you’ve been,” Jonathan said, giving Erina a defeated smile even as he let out a melancholy sigh, “I do apologize again for doing that to you.”

She smiled back, much more energetically. “I’m not spiteful enough to get myself killed just to get back at you Jonathan, don’t worry.”

Jonathan was reluctant to laugh at that, but he found that he had no choice. Erina laughed as well, and as always her giggle warmed him to the core. Wamuu watched them, his blue eyes taking in everything, his lips curled up at the corners just enough to make Jonathan wonder what exactly was taking place in the nightman’s brain.

“Speedwagon went through with it, then?” Jonathan asked Wamuu when he and Erina had settled.

Wamuu nodded. “Yes. I don’t think he will be very powerful, but he survived the procedure.”

The mental image of Speedwagon channeling the ripple, healing the wounded and burning monsters to ash with a touch, was one Jonathan struggled with. He wondered how quickly the man would be back on his feet, and how Clara and Tattoo and the others were handling it for now.

“Well then,” he pushed his chair back and stood up, “I suppose we should leave before your parents become too suspicious.”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” Erina said as she rose as well and walked around the table to him. They exchanged a smile, and wrapped their arms around one another. Then, before Jonathan knew it, their lips were pressed together, and a tiny taste of healthy young woman crept into his mouth where her tongue-tip just barely poked out and touched his. A few seconds later, he was standing straight again, and Erina was resting her head against his upper arm. He wasn’t even sure who had initiated the kiss, or if he had known it would happen before it did. It had come and gone as naturally as a heartbeat or a breath of air.

“I’ll return to London,” Wamuu said once the other two had pulled away from each other again, relieving the chair of his weight and pulling his cowl back up over his circlet, “you’ll both hear from me when we find the target.”

…

The snow had gone down a bit, and the wind slowed to a mere persistent moan. Perched on the rooftop, he leaned against a still-warm chimney, enjoying the juxtaposition of heat and cold across his body. There was a faint whiff of woodsmoke left trickling up from within and losing itself in the cold, snow-flecked breeze. He inhaled it, thinking of so many woodfires, in so many lands, all the way back to his earliest memories in the country of jaguars and leaf-ants and trees as tall as the daymen’s towers. As it often did, the smell brought the question back to his mind. How many more? Fate had been with him for thousands of summers and winters after he’d stopped counting, but even if he died of old age it wouldn’t be too many thousands of summers and winters more. And he probably would not die of old age. Fate could not love him that much.

Taking another bite out of the bat he’d caught hibernating in the attic below and wiping the blood off of his chin, he removed his head from the chimney-top and looked back out across the field. Jonathan Joestar’s silhouette grew smaller as it trekked across the snow, the footprints in its wake slowly disappearing under this gentler snow. His hood was down, letting some of that night black hair with its faint undertone of blue out to contrast against the snow.

Wamuu smiled.

After watching Jonathan continue back toward his father’s palace for a minute longer, he finished the bat and stood up straight, turning his head in the opposite direction. West, and south. Toward the Middle Ocean, and the land of jaguars and trees that the sun was shining upon far across it. His smile widened, and he showed his teeth.

“You can’t win now,” he whispered, letting the wind carry his voice toward the sleeper beyond the ocean, “you’re finished.”

…

“It is good to see a little enthusiasm from you,” Dr. Thomson Pendleton said as he placed the pencil and stack of unlined papers down on George Joestar’s bedside table, “although, from your records that does seem to be becoming a pattern.”

“What do you mean by that?” George gave him a half-serious scowl as he turned in place where he sat on the bed to place his hands on the offering.

“I mean,” Thomson replied, adjusting his spectacles over his broad, ruddy nose, “that you’ve been in and out of this institute enough times in the last two years for things to get familiar. You come in looking half dead, can barely leave your bed for two to three weeks, start walking around a bit and changing your mind about not being able to draw outside your studio for a week or two afterward, go back home, and return in a few months, again in shambles.” He shook his head. “I know Dr. Jones told you this before I even came back to England, but you ought to rethink your home environment.”

George harrumphed, shaking his mustached head and picking up the pencil and adjusting the lamp on the bedside table. Outside, the night remained silent and still, in stark contrast to the night before. “I was born in that house,” he said, “and I’ve lived in it all my life. None of the help have been sick. JoJo is healthy. Dio is healthy. My recurrent ailment must be age catching up with me.”

“Or someone poisoning you.”

George put the pencil down again and very slowly craned his head back up at Dr. Pendleton. A trace of the familiar humor remained on his features, but only a trace. “I appreciate the amount of attention you’ve been giving me, doctor. But that isn’t something I’d like to hear from you even in jest. I’ve known each of my servants for years. I consider them almost like family.”

Thomson held up his hands in a defeated gesture. “My apologies. I wasn’t being serious, but bad taste, yes.” He adjusted his glasses again. “But I am serious about toxicity, even if there’s no plot or culprit behind it. Have you been eating or drinking anything different? Maybe a new brand of tobacco?”

He shook his head. “Doctor Jones said the same thing. I’ve changed everything in my diet, my bedroom, and my pipe.” He chuckled, a little grimly. “Dio even tried to get me to give up the nettle tea Jones suggested to me after last time. ‘I’ve tasted it myself, father, and it’s perfectly awful.’ He always says something like that when he brings it.”

George looked back down at the paper, tapping the pencil lead against it as if thinking where to start. The mention of one of Baron Joestar’s boys, of course, was a natural opening for the other thing Thomson had wanted to talk to him about this evening.

“Your other heir was over at our house for dinner, yesterday.”

George smiled. “It almost makes me feel a decade younger. Do you as well?”

Thomson chewed his lip a little before answering. “A bit, I suppose. Though I don’t recall Jonathan keeping such colorful company when he was a boy.”

The moustached face looked back up at him, eyes raised curiously. “What company would this be?”

“A Mr. Gabriel Wamuu. American Indian fellow. Near seven feet tall. You wouldn’t have forgotten him.”

For a moment, George was silent, his face perplexed. “JoJo hasn’t told me about anyone like that.” He turned away for a moment. “Well, I suppose he wouldn’t have thought to bother me with such things, with me recovering. Though I ask him what he’s been about every time I see him, and I can’t think why he wouldn’t mention such a person.” He was still for another moment, and then looked back up at the doctor. “He brought this Mr. Wamuu to your house?”

“Erina told us she’d invited both of them,” Thomson said, “and I’m still trying to get her to explain what it was all about. All I can tell is that it’s got something to do with your son’s research, but why Erina would be involved in that I can’t get her to give a straight answer.”

“Hmm.”

George looked unhappy. Perhaps even hurt.

“He normally tells me everything. All his friends at the academy. All his research contacts and breakthroughs. Every bit of nonsense his brother’s been getting up to most recently.” He shook his head yet again. “Why he’d have omitted this, I can’t say. I suppose the habit of strange company may be in the blood. He’s so very like his mother, aside from my hair.”

It was Thomson’s turn to raise his fading blonde eyebrows. “She must have been quite a woman.”

“Oh, that she was.” The wistful expression gave way to a bittersweet smile. “I endured my fair share of jabs at court when I married a woman taller than I am, but no one would say a word against the son she gave me.” He chuckled. “They’d be too afraid of him. But she did have strange houseguests on occasion. Maybe that birthmark he got from her was a warning I should have heeded.”

“You mentioned that once, I think.”

“Well, it seemed like an omen itself when I met Mary. With that mark on her neck, she simply had to take the name Joestar.” He laughed again. “That was the very argument I made that finally convinced her to accept the ring.”

Suddenly, he looked serious again.

“And here I go talking about Mary again when you came to ask me about JoJo.” He slumped forward a little onto his forearms. “It is an unfortunate habit of mine.”

“Well, it does sound like he takes after her in quite a few ways.”

George frowned. “Yes. Perhaps that’s exactly the problem. Every time I look at my son, he reminds me of her. I wonder if I’m even seeing him at all.” He paused for a moment, and looked up at the wall, staring at nothing. “I gave my boys everything I could. The best of everything that money and connections can buy. But I wonder if there was something I failed to provide.”

He tried to rise to his feet, bracing himself against the table with one hand and the nearby windowsill with the other. Thomson put a hand on his shoulder to guide him back down, but George just redoubled his efforts to stand, defiantly. He managed to get up and stand mostly straight, leaning against the wall with one hand for support. Dr. Pendleton shook his head disapprovingly, but George ignored him.

“What does he tell me, really? Such minor, trivial things. So many times when he’s looked troubled, and I asked him what ailed him, he would deny any ailment at all. And Dio.”

Dr. Pendleton held his tongue. Erina had barely ever mentioned Baron Joestar’s adoptive son, but on the one or two occasions that she had her tone and expression had had him frightened on her behalf.

“He hadn’t even turned thirteen when he arrived. His father had just died. I always meant to sit him down and help talk him through what he must have been going through, but…I don’t think I ever really did, the way that I’d intended.” He looked down at the floor, his voice quieter. “He’s doing perfectly well now, of course. Set to graduate valedictorian. A great athlete, though nowhere near as great as JoJo. But I don’t know if I really know him at all.”

Thomson placed a hand on George’s shoulder, and spoke again to the man who had been a distant acquaintance for seven years, but in the last few weeks become something like a friend. “Don’t worry, George. From what I’ve seen of you, there’s no way you could have been a bad father. Clem and I gave Erina all the attention either of us had to give, and she still runs off with pagan monks without warning.” He shook his head and rolled his own eyes as George looked up at him incredulously. “God, I wish that was metaphorical.”

George smiled, looking reassured. “Ah. Well, that does put things in perspective I suppose.” He sat back down on the bed, turning toward the drawing supplies. “I think my real problem is that I didn’t have a good enough doctor until this stay. I know I’ll be home for Christmas next week the way you’ve steered my recovery.”

The doctor nodded encouragingly, and gave him a little smile. “That does seem likely. And, I think this might be a perfect opportunity for you to sit down with your boys and have a real conversation.” His smile faded away a bit. “I know Clem and I will be having one with Erina.”

Just then, there was a tap on the door. Doctor Pendleton looked over his shoulder at the half open portal, and chuckled. “Speak of the little hellion herself.”

Out in the hallway, a tired looking Erina glowered at her father, letting out a frustrated little growl. “Not now papa, it’s not been that kind of evening. There’s someone here to see Baron Joestar, he says it’s very important.”

Thomson wrinkled his nose and adjusted his glasses. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the emergency room?”

Erina sighed and held up her sun-kissed hands. “He barged through before Melissa could even make it up here from reception, someone had to run after him.” She turned her head to the left and glared resentfully at the person next to her. After looking back at George and getting a confused, but curious, nod of his head, Thomson opened the door the rest of the way to see an elderly man standing beside his daughter. A thick wool coat was wrapped around the old man’s bony shoulders, and his beard and moustache were gray, but he stood almost rail straight and his gray eyes were sharp and attentive.

“Hello,” the old man said, his voice low and even, “I must speak with Baron Joestar.”

Thomson’s eyebrows narrowed a little further. Something about the way the visitor spoke seemed…odd? Different? It wasn’t the accent, his dialect was like any rural Midlander’s. The pace, perhaps? The way he intoned? Whatever the case, he looked serious enough that Thomson felt compelled to take a couple of steps back and indicate the man sitting on the bed. The visitor came inside, and stared at George with a suddenly confused and almost disappointed expression. George, looking understandably taken aback, cocked his head a little before replying. “I am he. And yourself?”

The old man’s posture shifted. He looked awkward. Almost lost. George seemed ready to open his mouth again before he finally answered. “Hogan. Noel Hogan.” He was silent again, looking dazedly back and forth between George and Thomson, and – for a moment – giving what seemed like a suspicious glare back at Erina before returning his attention to George.

“Pardon me, your lordship,” Noel said, eyes straightening up again, “I think there’s been a mistake. There wouldn’t happen to be another man named Joestar in Hampshire, that you know of? A younger fellow?” A brief pause. “I have an urgent message to be delivered to him, strictly in person.”

George’s face was still, but the look in his eyes grew a bit more miserable. “I have two sons. Jonathan and Dio are both on their holidays from university. Those are the only other Joestars.”

“I see.” Noel nodded, slowly but earnestly, and a bit of focus came back to his posture and gaze. “Very tall, muscular?”

“That would be Jonathan.” George sat straighter and spoke louder, fixing Mister Hogan in a sharper, shrewder look than he had put on since entering the hospital again. The expression, Thomson imagined, that George’s rivals at court were probably well familiar with. “From whom do you bring this message?”

Hogan shook his head. “My apologies, sir. I’m not at liberty to discuss this affair with any but one specific Joestar. I am sorry for disturbing you.”

And with that, and a respectful bow of his head, Hogan turned and walked back out of the room with the posture and energy of a man half his age. Thomson stared after him for a moment. His daughter, still standing just outside in the hall, stared for considerably longer, and with much more obvious suspicion. He wondered, with a private groan, if this had anything to do with Jonathan’s terrifying American Indian friend. And, with significantly more annoyance, how much Erina knew about it.

“I suppose that’ll be a longer Christmas dinner conversation, then?” He said, turning back to George.

George Joestar looked down, and nodded sadly. “Yes, it seems so. God, how much have I really not been told?”

…​

Today’s weather had come as a welcome change. The roads were smooth, the streets uncongested, and the people in a far more accepting frame of mind. After the way Browne Esquire had shaken his hand at the end of the evening’s case work, Dio was all but certain that he’d be getting at least one offer immediately upon graduation this coming spring. All in all, he thought he’d earned a day or two off. He could spend tomorrow and the next day jogging, catching up on his Voltaire, going into town for a few chess games, and maybe even figure out what all this business of JoJo’s was about. George had said he’d be out of the hospital shortly, almost certainly before Christmas Eve, and Dio needed his body well rested and his mind undistracted for handling this next critical stage.

The coach turned in a slow circle that signaled its arrival at the Joestar forecourt with its central fountain. He let out a yawn as he replaced his hat on his head and opened the cab door. As soon as he stepped out onto the neatly shoveled flagstones, however, he heard the sound of another coach moving away, followed immediately by the front door of the house closing behind someone.

He stepped away across the lot, and squinted at the other carriage before his own followed it away. He ran through his head for anyone who should be arriving at this hour. They’d just gotten the groceries yesterday. It was far too late for mail. The servants would have gone in through the eastern side door, closer to their quarters.

His eyes narrowed, and he felt his hand rise to his chin. Dropping into a slightly crouched posture, he darted as quickly as he could without making noise across the pavers and came in through the servant door himself. Removing his hat, he padded down the hallway and pulled the carmine curtain aside just a few inches so he could peek out into the foyer. As he had suspected, Erina Pendleton was standing just inside the door, talking very quickly and in a hushed voice to JoJo. What he had not been expecting, however, was the fact that she was wearing the white skirt and apron of her hospital uniform, the crispness of the former marred by wet snowmelt and grime as if she’d been running in it outdoors. She clutched her hat in front of her as she babbled up at JoJo intently. Their faces were grim, their eyes wide and alarmed.

Dio’s own eyebrows began creeping upward. Now what exactly was this? Any remaining thoughts about a hot shower and a soft mattress faded from his mind. JoJo turned away from Erina and outright ran out of the foyer through the back door behind the stairs. Erina stood in place, staring anxiously at the floor. She was breathing strangely, Dio noticed. Very slowly in, very sharply out, opening her mouth with each breath. A habit he didn’t think he’d noticed before, and Dio considered himself very observant when it came to mannerisms. Just as he was beginning to wonder if she was having some sort of respiratory attack, JoJo returned, bearing a hooded lantern in one hand and a pair of overcoats in the other. Erina took one of them, and the two began donning them as they marched back toward the front door and stepped out into the silent, windless night.

Now, just where do they think they’re going at this hour, and not even dressed for a night out?

He looked back the way he’d come, readjusting his own overcoat and hood to prepare for the outdoors again, and then looked out the foyer window at the two retreating figures on the forecourt. He saw the light of Jonathan’s lantern come on. Good, that should make this easier. Dio padded back up the hallway and waited another moment at the servant door before quietly opening it and closing it behind himself. He expected to see them trek across the meadow toward Aldershot, but instead they kept to the hoof and wheel tracks of the winding road, and then took the other turn, toward the south.

Dio barely felt the cold as he ducked behind the top of a snow-covered hillock and watched them take their new course. There was nothing within walking distance that way. Especially not at this time of year, and of night. Jonathan’s imposing silhouette was rigid, businesslike. Erina’s slimmer outline looked tense, perhaps even frightened. They didn’t appear to be speaking. He was beginning to wonder if they had just had a row about something as they left the manor when he heard a foot crunch through the snow behind him. He whirled around to face the newcomer, but before he could a pair of hands closed around his throat, and he was jerked off his feet and driven down into the snow by a force like a steam engine.

…

“Jonathan, did you hear that?”

Erina’s body had gone stiff, her eyes even wider in the darkness than they’d been a moment before. Jonathan froze, lowering his lantern’s hood and bending his knees, ready to leap. “Where?” He asked her.

The stars were bright enough for him to see her head nod itself toward the hillock just behind them, a few yards before the intersection. Back toward the manor. Jonathan’s heartbeat picked up.

“What did it sound like?” His voice, already low, had become a whisper.

“Like…” Erina whispered back, staring warily back at the mound “…snow crunching…a fight?” She put a hand to her ear. “It’s quiet now, but I know I heard it.”

“Follow me, but stay behind.” He handed her the lantern, which she took after a moment’s fumbling. “Keep your ripple breathing up until we know it’s safe.” As he finished speaking, he took in the first of his own deep, lung-plunging breaths, easing himself into the rhythm that brought the warmth and tingling static as he led Erina back the way they’d come. When he reached the foot of the hillock, Jonathan heard a very light, low scuffling himself from the other side of it. And, a moment later, a low, harshly whispering voice.

“One more chance, sir,” the voice sounded elderly, and spoke with a faint Midlands accent, “If you’re not Joestar, you know Joestar. Tell me where he is, and you may live.”

“Oh sod off already!” The hairs on Jonathan’s back stood on end beneath his coat, and it had nothing to do with the ripple flowing through his blood. That was Dio’s voice. Tiny and choked, but recognizable. Dio, but without the accent and smoothly eloquent tone he’d spent half of his life cultivating.

A second later, there was a loud, sharp crunch, and a pained grunt. As if someone had just been thrown back against the snow-covered earth with enough force to knock the wind out of him.

Jonathan’s mind was empty as he leapt across the top of the hillock. His lungs, legs, and arms worked mechanically, following the lead of his eyes as they spotted Dio sprawled, gasping, against the hillside, his mouth open in a silent scream and eyes wide and glassy with disbelieving horror, and the old man standing over him with claws extended and two rows of crystalline, spike-shaped teeth gleaming in the starlight.

Jonathan’s feet hit the snow, bringing the vampire’s graying head around to face him with the sound of the impact. He saw the monster’s hand reaching into its belt, closing around the handle of a revolver. His brain worked frantically, calculating quickly and wordlessly on a level almost too reflexive to be called thought. As the old man pulled the gun out and pressed one claw against the hammer, Jonathan made as if to pounce directly at him, but then suddenly threw himself down on his belly, sliding down the snowy hillside with his arms outstretched in front of him. The vampire adjusted his aim, but a moment too slow; Jonathan’s fingers had stabbed out into the snow, pointing right into the soles of the assassin’s feet from just half a yard away.

Steam hissed upward, and the pistol fired as the vampire’s finger twitched on the trigger, the loud report of the gunshot drowning out the horrible, high-pitched whistle as smoke emerged from the tops of his boots. Jonathan didn’t waste his chance. He reached upward, and grabbed the old man by the waist. With his fingers pressed as hard as he could against the target, the thin layer of fabric in between them could only block a fraction of the ripple. Flames leaped up around Jonathan’s hands, burning them even as they healed. The old man dropped his pistol and started to fall down, letting Jonathan stab another finger directly into his brow just as he pushed out another breath through his teeth. There was no death scream for this one. The old man’s head was instantly engulfed in violent yellow fire, rushing upward as if from a gas stove turned up too high. When he hit the ground, there was no flesh remaining on or inside of the blackened skull.

It took a minute for Jonathan to come back down. As soon as the world had stopped spinning and the ringing in his ears mostly stopped, he ran his hands across his shoulders and chest, feeling for a bullet wound. There was none, thank god. The shot must have gone over his head as he’d hoped it would. A glance up at the hilltop behind him revealed Erina, watching furtively from behind the mound with the lantern half raised, likewise unhurt. Then, feeling a weight melt from his shoulders, he walked over to Dio, who was just now managing to sit back up.

“Are you alright? Can you speak?”

Dio stared at him, his long blonde bangs dangling wetly over his face. Jonathan was beginning to fear his brother had taken a blow to the head by the time Dio finally nodded yes. His golden hair shifted limply across his forehead and eyes. Jonathan tried to remember if there’d ever been a time he had seen Dio not fix his hair before getting up from a tackle or fall. He couldn’t think of one.

“Are you hurt? Aside from those bruises?” Jonathan bent down and indicated the dark finger marks on Dio’s neck. Dio shook his head no, this time. Jonathan was grateful beyond words that Dio’s clothing wasn’t torn, and that none of his exposed skin bore the puncture marks of fingernails or fangs. There was another moment of silence, before Dio finally reached up and pushed back his bangs.

“I’m quite alright.”

Jonathan offered his hand, but Dio averted his gaze from it, and gritted his teeth as he pushed himself up off the snow and into a stiff standing position. He brushed the snow off the back of his coat, and looked at the smoldering wreck of a human body where it lay twisted in the pool of bubbling snowmelt and slush. Jonathan opened his mouth a little, but after changing his mind about what to say half a dozen times in the space of a second he closed it again without making a sound. Dio’s eyes were unblinking, focused on the remains like clear, open telescopes. An overwhelming sense of unreality flowed across the hillock like a crushing tide. Jonathan had forced himself to remember, at least once after each of his meetings with Wamuu, that he was really only living one life, and there was only the one world. But having this happen in front of Dio, just minutes on foot from the Joestar doorstep, and with neither Wamuu nor Speedwagon present or even aware of the situation…it felt as if something had broken. A wall come down, or a curtain unraveling to threads.

“Well,” Jonathan said, after letting out a long, slow breath.

“JoJo,” Dio said, his voice returned to its usual controlled tones and refined dialect, “what was that?”

Jonathan felt the strangest impulse to chuckle, or to blush. As if ashamed of the absurdity this sounded like, despite Dio having just seen what he’d seen. What do I even say? “Well, you see Dio, vampires are real and that was a vampire?” “I know you’re not one for superstition, Dio, but you almost got eaten by a demon?” A breeze began to stir, raising some particles of snow off of the ground and sweeping them up into the air. Jonathan opened his mouth again, but still nothing came out.

Dio looked up from the corpse and eyed Jonathan sharply. Coldly. “Do you know what that was?”

The wind continued lapping at Jonathan’s hair, and at the disturbed snow around his boots. “Yes,” Jonathan said, after a moment’s thought. Dio looked…damn it, how could he make his face so unreadable!

“Then do you care to explain it to me?”

Jonathan took a step back, lowering his head. “Well,” he said, his voice apologetic, conciliatory, “you must understand…”

Jonathan stopped. He stepped forward again, making Dio adjust his own position to make way. From the top of the hill, he felt Erina’s eyes on him.

“Dio, what are you doing here?”

Dio blinked. “I’m sorry?” He tilted his head a little to the side, narrowing his eyes accusingly at Jonathan. “I think my question was rather more pressing, JoJo.”

Jonathan breathed in again, and hesitated for a moment before speaking. “Well then, you should be more than willing to explain what you were doing out here so that you can hear the answer.”

He felt a sharp stab of self reproach. That came out much more unfair and hostile-sounding than he’d meant it to. Jonathan had intended to…

Well, actually, on further thought, no. No, that sounded exactly the way he wanted it to sound.

“I saw you and Miss Pendleton running off into the night as if mad,” Dio said, lowering his eyebrows into a glare as his voice grew steelier, “and I wanted to see what my brother would be doing so urgently at this hour.”

“What business would it be of yours?”

Dio looked aggrieved. Outraged, even. “JoJo…”

“If you were so concerned, why didn’t you just shout after us and ask?”

The wind continued blowing. Dio was silent. His face stuck in that expression that had been jumping out at Jonathan more and more these past two weeks.

“You’re right,” Dio said, after a moment, “I should have done that.”

Jonathan nodded his head. He realized he was breathing heavily. More than that, he realized his breath was starting to move back into what Erina called ripples-to-waves.

Dio looked down, and then back up at Jonathan. His expression remorseful, and a conciliatory smile beginning to appear. “Now, if you don’t have anything else to ask me first, I really would appreciate it if you could explain-”

“I’ll tell you later.”

Dio’s eyebrows rose. “What?”

“I have to talk to Erina first,” Jonathan said, fists clenching against the breeze, “and I might not be home for a little while. I’ll tell you what’s going on later. Go home. Shut the doors. Be wary of strangers.”

“JoJo, whatever you’re doing, I was almost killed because of-”

“You were almost killed because you put yourself somewhere where you don’t belong, Dio.” He breathed in, expanding his chest, and stood straighter. Dio inched another step backward. “And there are some things you can’t just talk your way out of.”

They stared at one another. Dio blinked, twice. His mouth trembled, but didn’t open. Jonathan saw Dio’s eyes flicker up the hill, toward Erina, before returning to himself.

Then, Dio turned around without another word and walked back toward the manor. Jonathan watched his foster brother shuffle away through the snow for a few moments before turning himself and climbing back to where Erina was waiting.



TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[MagnificentLilyWitch]

Crossposting from SV since there is no longer a time difference:

Ohh! That last line. I don't think Jojo could have pissed Dio off more if he had tried.

Erina and Jonathan continue to be sweethearts. Though his overprotectivness was irritating, if in character.

Hearing more about Wammu and Nightpeople was great.

Maybe Speedwagon will get a new hat with carmine dye so he can actually control it at range no that he can use the ripple? That something as mundane as carmine can work like LisaLisa's scarf is a nice touch. It really helps to sell this an an Urban Fantasy, the magical is right under our noses but we don't notice it.

George and the Pendletons being banally racist and out of touch also helped ground the story in time and remind us that Jonathan, Speedwagon and Erina are very accepting for their time and culture.

 

[Leila Hann]

 

[Leila Hann]

INTERLUDE: Behind The Masks
​

The wind had gone down again, but the stars were hidden behind thick clouds now, and tiny snowflakes – so light they were scarcely there – fell onto the brick plateaus and concrete ravines, silhouetted against the smoke of narrow, iron volcanos. The tall man looked out over the wilderness, tasting the air, parsing out the chemicals he tasted in the smoke.

He thought, carefully. Unmoving. By the time he shifted his massive shoulders and reached into the folds of his heavy, hooded cloak, the birds had mistaken him for a statue, and flew away in a panic at the sudden movement. Slowly, he pulled a pale, blankly staring stone mask out from its hidden pouch and turned it around in his hands, so that the eyeless, featureless indentation of its back side faced him.

He stopped for a moment, thinking a little bit more. His eyes idly followed the gray, reckless, fat little birds as they flapped away through the narrow canyons and snowy forest of shingles and chimney stones. He clucked his tongue. Once. Twice. Twice more in quick succession, following a tune he’d heard once but had never managed to learn the name of. Another, silent moment of thought. Then, he pushed the mask to his face and secreted a drop of blood from under his fingernail. The mask turned warm in his hands, and five quartzite-tipped blades punched through his skull and deep into his brain.

His towering body fell back, collapsing onto the snow-covered roof tiles. He could have stayed on his feet, of course, but this way was much less distracting.

After the familiar static tingle and moment of vertigo, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he heard a voice.

“Welcome back. I was hoping your report would come tonight.”

Beneath the mask, his lips turned up in a smile, parting a little to release his fangs. He thought back, clearing his mind of everything besides the words, and letting the five blades conduct them out of his brain and across the unseen void. “He’s here, my lord. And I’ve found one of the daymen he’s recruited this time.” He paused a moment, and compressed one of his skull plates, reshaping the brain matter beneath so that the sensation of taste was shared across the connection. A memory, from centuries ago. “He always did have good taste in snacks. We’ll see if that continues holding true.”

The calm, paternal voice chuckled good naturedly back from nowhere, and everywhere. “I hope you plan to act soon, though. Every night you spend awake costs us more energy. Truthfully, I was beginning to have second thoughts about this plan before you spoke.”

His smile vanished, and he quickly squeezed his brain back into the usual exposure profile. All sound analogue, no memory sharing or other sensory input. “Of course. I know what this costs us. Don’t worry, my lord, the anaconda is squeezing tighter. One more mask, and I’ll be able to set the trap.”

Another voice was heard, then. Higher. Hoarser. More impatient. “We’ve all set traps for him before. How are you so sure this time will be different?”

Before he could respond to that, the first voice preempted him. “Be still, Esidisi. We can afford to continue this for some nights yet. But,” the first voice returned it’s attention to him, “make sure that you do not fall prey to overconfidence. Don’t hesitate to ask for advice as things move into place.”

He cocked his head in affirmation, grinding the edge of the mask against the snow covered roof tiles under him. “Of course. I just need to do some more watching before we can start that kind of planning.”

The second, hoarser voice spoke again. “Very well, then. Just see that you don’t electrocute yourself again as you prowl their cities.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, his fangs reflexively extending themselves further. “I told you, I was testing the current strength. And it was only one time.”

“That will be all, then,” the first voice spoke, the finality of its tone such that the words were almost unneeded, “You will continue to inform us as the operation proceeds. Good hunting.”

He raised his hands to the mask, and jerked it out, head twitching a little as one of the blade-tips scraped against the inside of his skull during its withdrawal. By the time he opened his eyes and looked back up into the gray and snow-laden sky, his head was fully healed, and his hair regrown. For a long minute, he lay down on the roof, long hair splayed out around him like a vermilion carpet, stone mask clutched to his chest under both hands as he sucked his own blood back into his fingertips.

A few more nights. Just a few more nights.

 

[Leila Hann]

9. Into The Night
​

Jonathan clutched Erina’s hand tighter as they rounded the corner and sloshed through the half-melted snow below the huge, ogre-like wall carving that was the street’s namesake. A little pale light still managed to seep through the clouds and smog from the far west; Wamuu had his cowl up, his gloves on, and a thick mass of scarves wrapped around his downcast face as he led the two of them down the grimy, shadow-infested sidewalk.

“This is where Mister Speedwagon lives?” Erina asked, eyes wide as they took in the moldering brick, the broken street lamps, and the furtive, shabbily dressed men that eyed the trio from the crannies and alleyways. She tightened the dark red scarf around her neck. She’d been adjusting it a lot this evening. Jonathan wondered if perhaps she was regretting not having learned to use it as a weapon when she was still with the monks.

“I can still bring you home again,” Jonathan said, casting a warning glare at a pair of shadowy silhouettes who were eyeing Erina a little too appraisingly, “You can always meet him during our next outing.”

“No, it’s alright.” She looked back up at Jonathan as he led her across the slush after Wamuu. “I’m just surprised you’d have made a friend from somewhere like this.”

Jonathan half sighed and half chuckled. “Well, we did meet during a burglary attempt.” He was about to continue speaking, and tell Erina that Speedwagon wasn’t his only Ogre Street born acquaintance, but stopped himself. Partly because mentioning Dio wasn’t going to do anything to help Erina’s spirits. But moreso, because comparing him to Speedwagon just struck Jonathan as wrong in a way he couldn’t quite articulate, but he’d been feeling more and more strongly with every passing day. “It’s that one just five doors up.” He pointed at the brick building with the lacy window curtains coming up ahead. “You don’t have to come in, really.”

Erina rolled her eyes and shook her hooded head. “I told you, Jonathan. I’ve treated prostitutes. I’m not afraid of them.”

Jonathan gritted his teeth. “I know that. But it’s not quite the same when you’re here out of uniform.”

She pulled on his arm, and turned her face very slowly around toward his, one forget-me-not blue eye narrowed. “Jonathan, prostitution is not contagious. Or are you afraid I’ll be bitten by some kind of were-whore?”

“There’s no reason to worry,” Wamuu’s voice suddenly boomed out from up ahead, without the nightman slowing his pace or even turning back around, “those went extinct five hundred years ago.”

Jonathan and Erina both froze in place, eyes and mouths hanging open. Wamuu, who had nearly reached the front door of Clara’s, turned around and beckoned them onward.

“You, um. You are joking about that?” Jonathan asked. He could feel Erina’s grip on his hand tightening again.

Wamuu didn’t answer. He just turned back around and continued making his way to the door. Jonathan and Erina gave each other a long and very uncertain look before following him into Clara Speedwagon’s Respectable Establishment.

It wasn’t as cold as it had been the last time Jonathan visited the place, but the warmth when they came in the door and Jonathan closed it behind them was still welcome. The curtains, slightly threadbare couches, and lights were just as they’d been previously. Tattoo stood beside the door, arms folded, glaring at Jonathan with barely masked hostility on his dyed and bearded face. Jonathan wondered, briefly, if he should beg the man’s pardon for something. Two of the women he’d seen before – the older, freckled one with the yellow dress, and the slightly younger brunette in blue – were seated on a couch. Upon seeing Jonathan, they each bid a brief hello, and bowed their heads respectfully, if somberly. Beside him, Erina looked back and forth between them and Jonathan with open curiosity as he returned the greetings, and bid good evening to Tattoo as well.

“You know,” the woman in blue said after a moment, “you can have a seat. You don’t have to stand there all menacing.”

“Of course. My apologies, miss.” Jonathan led Erina to one of the free couches and sat down in it. After a moment’s pause, she sat beside him. Barely a second later, the curtains covering the back door parted, and Wamuu – his hood and scarf down, and hair and headdress exposed – glided back in, followed closely by Speedwagon. He wasn’t wearing his bowler hat, and there were fresh looking bandages wrapped around his midsection under his shirt. As he came into the room after Wamuu, Jonathan saw that he was leaning on a staff.

“Oi there, JoJo,” Speedwagon’s smile lit up his face without any hint of pain, “was hoping you’d find the time to make it over again. And this must be Miss Pendleton?”

“Yes,” Erina said, rather sharply, calling Speedwagon’s focus to her rather than Jonathan, “and if there’s anything you wish to know from or about me, you can address me directly.” Her voice softened as she spoke, and the demure smile that adorned her lips came too quickly to be anything but a conscious effort.

Speedwagon smiled understandingly, and extended his free hand. “My sincerest apologies there. It’s nice meeting ya’.” She took his hand and shook it politely. Jonathan was glad to see no sign of lingering resentment in the shake. Once they let go, Speedwagon tottered into the middle of the room and looked back at Jonathan. “I think I should be back to full health in just a couple more days. But look what I can do now!” He pulled a cigarette out of somewhere (Jonathan couldn’t remember Speedwagon ever having smoked) and began breathing in deeply through his mouth.

“Oi, Ces!” The yellow-clad woman called out, leaning over toward the back door. “He’s going to do the cigarette trick again!”

Wamuu folded his arms and gave Speedwagon an exasperated, but resigned, glare. Jonathan and Erina looked at each other and then back at Speedwagon as he flipped his tie up over his shoulder and unbuttoned his three top buttons. The back curtain flew open again, and Cecily’s brown-haired head, done up in a frankly ostentatious pile of curls, popped through bearing a grin. Jonathan started to wonder why Cecily had her face painted like a common whore’s before quashing that thought with some rather confused self-recrimination. “Did he already…oh…hello there Mister Joestar, Mister Wamuu!” Her eyes moved over to Erina. “Oh, are you new?”

Erina raised her eyebrows as she turned to face the newcomer. “So women only come here to work, then?”

Cecily looked bemused. “Well…so far, at least?” She quickly caught herself, and then shifted fully into the room, folding her hands demurely in front of her red-robed waist and smiling with practiced coquetry. “I wouldn’t mind at all, though, if you don’t mind showing me how it’s done-”

“Miss Pendleton’s not a customer, Ces,” Speedwagon said as he finished pulling the top of his shirt open to reveal the tawny chest hair covering the wiry muscles beneath. He reached his free hand down and picked up the cigarette again from where he’d left it on the nearby armrest. Erina shook her head. Jonathan let out a sigh of relief.

“Oh.” Cecily looked relieved and disappointed in equal measures. “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss. Sorry about before.” She extended her hand, brown curls bouncing. “Don’t worry, I don’t bite.”

Erina’s arm stopped in the middle of its extension, and didn’t make contact with Cecily until she’d cast a very nervous look at the back of Wamuu’s head. After shaking, their attention returned to Speedwagon’s chest, which now had the tip of a cigarette held just an inch away from it.

“Well, now that I finally have the crowd’s attention.” He began breathing in, deeply, and out, sharply, through his mouth, and didn’t speak again until several breaths later. “I might’ve told you before I had the hottest blood in London, but look at me now!”

He hurriedly took in another deep, chest-undulating breath, and pressed the cigarette against his skin. Two breaths later, there was a tiny wisp of smoke where skin met paper. Three breaths after that, the cigarette tip had visibly curled. When he withdrew it, the tip of the roll was alight, and – Jonathan noticed – the upper part of Speedwagon’s shirt looked like it was wrinkling, as if left too long under a hot iron. He stopped, gasping, and the employees all clapped. Including Tattoo by the door.

“ROBBIE!” Clara’s voice shattered the air before Speedwagon could say anything else. “ARE YOU SMOKING UP THE PLACE AGAIN?”

Everyone’s faces went solemn and businesslike. Speedwagon hurriedly pressed the tip of the cigarette against his walking stick to douse it and then stuffed it into his pocket before Clara emerged into the room, almost bowling Cecily over. From somewhere in back, the baby began crying.

“Oh bloody hell I just…” Clara stopped in the middle of the room, shaking her dirty blonde head and lowering her thick eyebrows. “Welcome back Mister Joestar, Wamuu. And you must be Miss Pendleton. I’ll be back in just a right minute. Robbie, if you end up burning this place down I swear…well, why don’t the four of you go talk in Eliza’s old room. The customers will start any minute.”

They followed the Speedwagons back through the curtain, and then trailed after Robert once Clara split off to attend to her screaming infant. Ascending the stairs was a slow process, with Speedwagon dependent as he was on the stick and handrail. Wamuu offered to carry him, but he refused.

“I’ve heard about people whose bodies don’t process the ripple quite the same way.” Erina said thoughtfully, addressing Speedwagon rather awkwardly from behind the substantial obstacles of Jonathan and Wamuu. “One of the monks said that’s a sign of…witchcraft, or something like it.”

“If I’m a witch, no one told me.” Speedwagon panted as he heaved himself up the last few steps onto the landing and hobbled his way to a familiar wooden door. “Of course, I suppose that doesn’t mean I’m not one,” he continued, suddenly thoughtful, “just that I never knew it.”

Jonathan wasn’t sure how facetious he was being, or even how facetious he should be. Vampires, nightmen, the power to heal wounds or set paper alight. Why not latent witchcraft as well?

The bedroom that was once Eliza Day’s had been stripped of its blankets, sheets, and chair. There was only a bare straw mattress atop a discolored wooden frame and a pair of rose-colored drapes hanging limply over a closed, lightless window to distract from the bare walls and dust-coated floorboards. It felt colder in here than Jonathan remembered, and against the nighttime backdrop the drapes seemed dull and almost colorless. He spotted a pair of dark brown stains on the bedframe that looked like they’d been scrubbed away at with only partial success. They hadn’t been there before. My own blood. It felt strange, bringing Erina into a room that still bore the marks of his own wounds from weeks ago.

“Well,” Erina said as she closed the door behind her, eyes widening against the darkness as Speedwagon pulled out a candle and raised it to his still-exposed pectorals, “as I hope everyone here knows, Jonathan and I were attacked just outside his house.”

Speedwagon nodded yes while he began his ripple-to-waves breathing, sitting down on the bed and resting his walking stick against the wall. Wamuu said “Yes. Jonathan’s description was of a vampire slave. His master must have been searching for us ever since the other slave escaped in Brighton.”

“Yes,” Jonathan spoke, stepping forward into the middle of the empty room, “and this was the first time one of them has come armed.”

“You’ve only seen them surprised,” Wamuu reminded him, though he needn’t have, “and not expecting your ripple. This one knows you can’t be touched directly.” In the background, Speedwagon’s breathing grew louder.

“So, no one has any idea where he might have come from?” Erina asked. “Or, where its…master? King? The one with the mask…is?”

Wamuu shook his head, setting his chains swaying in the near-darkness. “Not unless you can track the assassin.”

“He’s long past the point of answering questions,” Jonathan said. He wondered, as he said the words, if he should be feeling something more than he was. He’d beheld that vampire – and all the others, back in the Brighton hospital – at his most monstrous, and his death had been completely inhuman in detail. But, intellectually, Jonathan knew that he had now killed what were still, at least partially, people. Seeing the old man use a weapon as mundane and modern as a revolver had broken through some sort of defense that Jonathan hadn’t even realized he’d been building. At the time, he’d been too distraught over the sight of Dio sprawled on the snow beneath the gleaming claws and fangs to realize what else had disturbed him so about that encounter. He forced himself to bury those thoughts again and focus on the task at hand. “All Erina or I could tell you is that he was elderly, well spoken, and from his accent somewhere in the Midlands. Probably rural.”

Suddenly, there was a loud, sputtering cough, followed by a manic wheeze, from the direction of the bed. Turning around, Jonathan saw Speedwagon holding the lit candle in one hand while the other clutched his chest as he continued coughing. He was just about to ask him if he needed help when Speedwagon started to recover.

“Midlands…” he coughed again “…country…accent, you say?”

“Yes,” Jonathan said as the shadows cast by the newly lit flame flickered across the walls and lit up Speedwagon’s face and exposed upper chest eerily, “is there something you’ve heard about?”

“Maybe,” Speedwagon continued sputtering a little, though his voice was gradually returning to normal, “I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground for anything that sounds, well, vampiric, as ya know. There was one I didn’t think much of when I heard it, but now that you say that, I think a town called Windknight’s Lot might be our mark.”

“Windknight’s Lot?” Jonathan said, surprised. “Such a small and out-of-the-way village, even one with that much history behind it, seems an unlikely place.”

“They usually favor cities,” Wamuu said, “but a small village far from notice is not unheard of. What is this history you speak of?”

“Windknight’s Lot was the headquarters of at least two knightly orders in the late medieval period. It’s just a tiny farming village today, but most of the medieval construction is still standing.”

“Is the history of the place relevant?” Erina asked.

“It could be,” Wamuu said, “vampires who don’t have cities to hide in often use caves or ruins as their lairs during the day. More often still if they have many slaves and wish to avoid notice.”

Jonathan and Erina both nodded grimly at this. “Well then,” Jonathan granted, “Windknight’s Lot would be the place for them to hide out. The ruins are quite extensive, and some of the buildings aren’t even that ruined. And with the obstacle courses built in to serve as training items, I could see how a vampire might be more comfortable there than a human.” He turned back to where Speedwagon was sitting, candle still in hand. “What have you heard?”

“A woman went missing in Exham village, and the next week her brother says he saw her during a nighttime delivery to Windknight’s Lot. The coppers had a look there, but couldn’t find anything. Then there’s the three other blokes taking the roads nearby by horse that I’ve heard about who never made it where they were going. I suppose anywhere around there could be it, but the missing woman spotted at Windknight’s is the most suspicious detail, I say.”

“Didn’t he try talking to his sister?” Erina asked.

Speedwagon nodded, his long blonde bangs starting to slip down over his candle-lit face. “That’s just the suspicious thing, though. She told him she never wanted to see his or any other relative’s face again and slammed the door.”

“Trying to protect them, perhaps?” Jonathan thought back to Eliza, and how becoming a demon had warped her perception of her own life and its relationship with others without exactly removing them, and how a spark of her original self had perhaps reasserted itself at the end.

“Could be,” Wamuu said, “or her master feared another disappearance from the same family would draw too much attention. This account sounds more like a victim of the mask’s wearer than of the mask.”

“Well, if everyone sees this the same way I do,” Speedwagon asked, “how are we going to crack this Christmas chestnut?”

…

The carriage moved slower as they veered off the main highway and onto the much smaller road leading to the ghostly white crags behind which the crater valley of Windknight’s Lot lay hidden. There were a few sets of wheel and hoof tracks visible in the thick snow that covered the country road, but most of them were old enough that today’s snow had nearly erased them. There was only a light, almost measured, fall of ashy particles now, but somehow Jonathan felt sure that the snow would pick up after the sun finished disappearing behind the hills.

“Someone should have patted down the snow after last night,” Jonathan said, looking warily out the window as he held the curtain back, “perhaps it’s merely a coincidence, but I fear it might not be.” He turned toward the front of the cab and leaned forward to speak through the front window. “Are you certain you can handle this road?”

“I’ve handled worse a time or two,” Speedwagon replied, one hand clutching his hat as he turned around to speak while his other remained on the reins, “there’s a reason they call me Speedwagon, you know.”

“But…isn’t your sister also named Speedwagon?” Erina asked, putting a gloved hand to her chin.

“She can drive as well as I can.”

Jonathan opened his mouth, but then just put his knuckles to it and decided not to even ask. Whatever question he could try asking about this, he was fairly sure the answer would only leave him more confused.

For the next several minutes, they rode in silence. The last of the gray sunlight darkened against the cloud-lined hills and overcast sky. On the seat beside him, Erina shifted in place, her face expressionless but her body language anxious, bordering on terrified. When asked, she’d only told him that she was plagued by guilt over the yarn she’d spun for her parents and the extra work she’d saddled her fellow nurses with, but Jonathan would be very surprised if that was really it. He tried to think back to how he’d felt when they’d first began the hunt for Jack the Ripper. He had still been at least half-skeptical about the nature of their quarry, and he had also had the benefit of knowing full well his own size and strength. Certainly, his first exposure to vampires had taught him how little his strength and intimidating presence were worth on their own against this enemy, but before then he had still been thinking from the perspective of someone who hadn’t felt physically threatened by anyone for years. Erina had been left with far less room for skepticism from the outset, and she was no physical fighter.

He sat back against the backrest, and closed his arm tighter around her shoulders. She leaned her hooded and hatted head into his chest. Her warm body relaxed somewhat, but not completely. After a moment’s thought, he planted a kiss against the top of her hood.

“We’re coming up on the tunnel,” Speedwagon announced from the coachman’s seat, “erm…come to think of it, JoJo, Miss Pendleton, it’s a rather long tunnel. If I were a vampire, and I knew someone might be coming for me, well…”

Jonathan nodded. “Good thinking.” He turned to Erina as the coach slowed to a stop. “I’ll get out and look ahead. You and Speedwagon should stay by the entrance, while there’s still sunlight.” Erina nodded assent, reluctantly, before getting out and stepping into the deep snow after Jonathan. Once Speedwagon had dismounted beside her, Jonathan pulled one of the kerosene lanterns they’d brought out from under the seat and lit it. “If something attacks me, I’ll try to draw it back toward the sun,” he said as his boots crunched through the snow toward the pitch blackness of the tunnel entrance before them. “I’ll see how far it is. Perhaps we can bring the coach to the turning point, if it’s clear, before I go ahead again.”

He raised the lantern in front of him as his last few syllables echoed softly around the tunnel opening. Jonathan stepped forward, planting one boot on bare stone as he crossed the leading edge of the snow that had managed to drift inside. In the flame’s dim light, he suddenly saw a rush of movement, as something massive, shapeless, and lightning fast fell from the tunnel ceiling up ahead and slammed against the rocky floor with an explosive crack. Jonathan flinched back and raised his free hand, sucking in a ripple breath. Erina gasped. Speedwagon shrieked.

“You’re earlier than I expected,” Wamuu said, stepping forward into the lamplight. His hood was down, and his chains jangled against each other as he approached. In the dingy yellow glow, the gold of his lip and earrings glittered, and that geometric spiral-shaped mark or tattoo across his face – normally hard to distinguish against his dark skin – caught the light and stood out.

Jonathan clenched his teeth and glared at Wamuu. “Why didn’t you say it was you?”

“Even after all this time, I sometimes forget how blind daymen are in the darkness.” He advanced a few steps further and rubbed his eyes before stopping just before Jonathan. “And you’d just woken me up.”

Unsure of what to say to that, Jonathan looked back over his shoulder and stood aside to be sure Erina and Speedwagon could see who it was. Behind them, the sky had gone from dusky gray to nearly charcoal. Only minutes before the last sunlight vanished, and the creatures of the night could walk freely.

“Well,” Jonathan said, lowering the lantern and leading Wamuu back toward the others as they advanced into the tunnel themselves, “have you found anything.”

Wamuu’s dark blonde head nodded yes. “When I first came through this tunnel, I was attacked by a horse of unusual strength and temperament.”

“What, like a…demon horse?” Speedwagon asked.

“Yes. After I killed it, another vampire slave tore himself free of the horse’s rib cage and wounded me with a gun. I had to eat much of the horse before I regained the strength to throw them out into the sun.”

Erina folded her arms. Her expression grew extremely skeptical. Wamuu looked at her, and simply said “the bones are under the fresh snow just two and a half steps to your right.” She and Speedwagon both looked at the indicated patch of snow, which did indeed appear suspiciously high, and edged away from it.

“Vampire animals,” Jonathan said, “you never mentioned this.”

“They’re rare. Not every stone mask wearer can create them. Not even most.” He turned his rugged head and looked back down the tunnel toward Windknight’s Lot. “This one is stronger than the last two.”

Jonathan forced out another ripple breath, one that he hadn’t even noticed inhaling. “How much stronger, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

Several seconds trickled by before Erina asked “What else did you find?” Wamuu raised his head again and answered.

“I detected several in the village, and saw some of them coming and going from the ruins Jonathan spoke of. The local governor is one, but I don’t think he’s the master vampire. The daymen seemed restless. Perhaps anxious. I could learn no more without showing myself.”

“Local governor?” Erina asked. “You mean the mayor?”

Wamuu shrugged his mountainous shoulders. “England has too many titles. Learning this language was time consuming enough without memorizing them as well.”

Erina and Jonathan both scowled a bit. Speedwagon just shook his head at them and said “Well, I can’t really say he’s wrong, can I?”

Outside, the sun had descended, and the sky gone black. Jonathan took yet another deep breath of frigid air that came out as white steam, and gestured back toward the coach. “We’d best start moving again.”

The coach proceeded into the tunnel. Erina holding up a lantern, Jonathan ready to leap from his seat again at a moment’s notice, and Wamuu going on foot alongside them, keeping pace with the horses’ cautious advance as his nocturnal senses scanned the darkness ahead. The raw stone of the tunnel was broken, here and there, by walls of crudely lain brick over much older stonemasonry. Jonathan could barely see the outlines of the carved blocks in the light of Erina’s lamp, but he knew Wamuu must be seeing everything, and perhaps even some hidden crevices that the construction crews had missed. No one knew exactly how old the human history of Windknight’s Crater was, but the medieval fortress hadn’t been the start of it by any means. There were bits and pieces of much older construction. Pre-Norman. Pre-Roman. Some that was claimed to even be pre-Druidic, though there was no archaeological consensus. Since at least the seventeenth century, there had been legends and old wives’ tales about hidden labyrinths the size of entire towns hidden deep within the mountainous ring, and even stranger tales about what could be found in them. Jonathan had always half-suspected that these legends were what inspired the early Tudor era lords to choose this particular crater valley for their chivalric headquarters. A whiff of adventure and magic to appeal to aspiring knights of the Order of Saint Thomas Beckett, and the Order of the White Lion after it. Perhaps, he mused, it wasn’t only fifteenth and sixteenth century warriors who found an allure in a place of such occluded ancientry. What better place for a vampire to choose as its lair?

For a moment, Jonathan allowed his wonderings to slip into outright fantasy, and dreamed that they might – in tracking their new quarry to its den – uncover one of those rumored ancient labyrinths. Why not? It would be less unbelievable than most of the other things he’d learned about since the fall semester had ended. Certainly an easier sell to his professors, if nothing else.

It wasn’t a sharp turn so much as a subtle incline in the tunnel that brought the feeble starlight back into view. The floor of the crater, white with snow, was all subtly bowl-shaped except for the flat region near the center that was roiling with fog. The lake, Jonathan remembered from his reading, was heated still by the magma dyke that had once fed the active volcano, and rarely froze over in even the harshest winters. As they emerged out into the powdery snowfall, invisible in the scant cloudy evening night, the lights of Windknight’s Lot village glowed out from one side of the steaming lake, and the half-broken spires of the castle – built into the opposite crater wall – loomed up over the other.

“Are you going to Scarborough fair…” a voice sang out softly, seeming to almost flow through the air around the unseen snowdrops and trickle across the frozen earth below. Jonathan’s grip on Erina’s free hand tightened as he swiveled his head around in search of the intruder, before realizing that the voice came from the coachman’s seat, and was in fact Speedwagon’s.

“You didn’t tell me he was such a good singer,” Erina whispered as she squeezed Jonathan’s hand back.

“I’d never heard him do it until now,” he returned, his voice also lowered.

He realized that without a line of sight to anyone but laconic Wamuu, and without any spoken words from himself or Erina for nearly the entire ride through the dark, he couldn’t really grudge Speedwagon’s desperation to break the silence. His singing voice really was something of a surprise, though. His accent seemed softer, his voice more even, with an almost honey-like quality to how the sound trickled slowly through one’s ears. Jonathan wondered if Clara had the same talent, and if that meant that her baby was the beneficiary of some excellent lullabies. Thinking of Clara, and of the Speedwagons’ circumstances in general, a question came to his mind. With all his skills, why is he still living on Ogre Street? Singer, driver, inspector...what could be keeping a man like him in a place like that? He would have to ask him, at an appropriate juncture.

Feeling rather guilty for leaving their coachman nearly alone in a darkness that concealed monsters, Jonathan spoke up as soon as Speedwagon finished the verse. “That was quite the performance.”

“Well thank you kindly JoJo,” Speedwagon tipped his hat and stole a quick glance and smile back through the front window before returning his attention to the road, “I suppose we’d best quiet down now though, unless we want to be noticed.” He paused for a moment, cocking his behatted head. “Do we want to be noticed?”

“I don’t think it matters,” Wamuu spoke from beside them, “either they know we’re coming, or they’ll think we’re just visitors.”

“Some of us are rather distinct,” Speedwagon allowed.

“Wamuu,” Jonathan leaned out the window, “you said the mayor is one. Do you suppose we could start with him and see if the master comes out of hiding?”

“That was my plan,” Wamuu said without looking back at him.

Erina raised her hand up to Jonathan’s wrist. “Are we really just going to march into the town hall, or his house if that’s where he is, and just…murder a mayor?”

“Well, when you say it like that it sounds bad,” Speedwagon chided her, “but the three of us have done much worse. How much did JoJo tell you about Brighton?”

“I’ll just shake the man’s hand, and if he’s not a vampire he’ll be better for it rather than worse.” Jonathan reassured her, though he wasn’t sure if he sounded convinced himself. Was it murder? To what degree were they still the people they had been? However necessary it was to kill them to protect so many other lives, was it really NOT murder?

Soon, they passed between the first pair of wooden-walled and shingle-roofed farmhouses at the outskirts of the village, and the lights shining from the windows lit the snowy earth and leafless trees up with a sickly gold. There was no one outside, not that that would be so unusual for a dark winter evening. In some of the windows, a bit of silvery tinsel was already hanging up, and more than one sill looked to have been freshly cleared off in anticipation of candles. Wamuu took out and opened his flask, and began blowing on it. Erina watched him curiously from across Jonathan’s shoulders. He and Speedwagon had told her all about this, of course, but Jonathan couldn’t blame her for being intrigued and perhaps, even after all she’d seen, somewhat disbelieving.

“Got anything?” Speedwagon asked. Wamuu shook his head and continued blowing.

“What about you, Speedwagon?” Jonathan asked.

Speedwagon shook his head. “Well that’s a right stupid question if you don’t mind my pointing it out. The wind’s blowing from right behind us!”

“Erm,” Erina cleared her throat before asking, in a tone of voice that made her sound almost ashamed of it, “I’m sorry, but what would a demon smell like?”

“Not sure that I’ve quite got the words, Miss Pendleton. I suppose it’s sort of like the stink you’ll get where the factory owners and lords’ve been spending too much time, present company excluded. Just worse.”

Jonathan looked back at Erina. “Well then, at this rate it seems likely we will be here for more than one night after all.”

Erina nodded. “It’s a good thing we thought of that then. Papa won’t be happy, but at least he won’t be surprised.” She shook her head. “I feel worse about saddling the other nurses with so much extra work, but I’m sure the thought of his daughter courting Baron Joestar’s heir helps to sweeten Papa’s medicine.”

Jonathan managed to banish the thought of masks and vampires from his mind long enough to smile. “He might not be wrong.”

Erina looked up into his eyes. Jonathan looked back into hers. She brought her other hand around, so that both were now clutching him.

“Hopefully not too many more nights,” Speedwagon said after another moment of silence, “I’ve got work of my own to get back to, especially with Kempo looking after a baby of his own now.”

Erina narrowed her eyes a little. “Back to…robbing people, was it?”

“Ayup!” Speedwagon announced, his voice loud and chipper. “Still the same old me, on the same old Ogre Street, vampires or no.”

Something in Speedwagon’s tone of voice struck Jonathan as affected, and beneath that perhaps a hint of distress. As if for all the theatrics, he was waiting for someone to prove him wrong.

“Even with your newfound incendiary talents?” Jonathan asked.

“What? Make a new business as an arsonist for hire? Or some kind of circus freak?” He chuckled. “I can already hear what Clara would have to say about either.”

Jonathan wondered what sort of counterpoint Speedwagon was hoping to be provided with, and what actually was going on with him behind all this, when Wamuu’s voice gave him a reprieve.

“Here.”

Speedwagon stopped the coach. They were near the center of the cluster of buildings that made up the hamlet, all built around one street that had been mostly cleared of snow. Wamuu was holding his flask up toward a box-shaped brick building with snow-covered shingles and lights burning in the upper floor windows.

“Looks like the town hall,” Erina said. Her tone of voice made it clear she wasn’t yet convinced that killing the mayor wouldn’t be murder.

Jonathan eyed the structure warily. Hopefully there would be wooden floors or wool carpeting inside. He’d tested his flow of power on stone, cement, soil, and brick, and brick was quite possibly the most impenetrable. He had been about to suggest that he take the front door and Wamuu the back to trap the monsters inside, but on further thought it would be best if the vampires fled outside into the snow. And they could always simply jump out the windows, of course. As he tried to think of a better approach, Speedwagon pulled the coach over and set the brakes.

“I think I should lead the way,” Jonathan said as they climbed out of the coach to join Wamuu as he approached the door, “Wamuu may be stronger, but if anything is waiting for us I believe I can kill it more quickly.”

Wamuu nodded, approvingly. “Erina goes behind you to hasten your healing. Then I. Then Speedwagon.” As he spoke, he turned his hooded head one way and then the other, semi-luminous eyes narrowed in search of hidden ambushers. Around them, the hamlet remained silent, and still save the slowly thickening snowflakes in the light of the windows and the steam rolling off of the nearby lake. It was with some gratitude that Jonathan put the cold silence behind him and opened the wooden door.

“No clerk?” Jonathan asked aloud as he led the way in. “An open door, but no one here?”

“Hallo?” Speedwagon shouted as he followed Erina in after the others, looking this way and that as if to spot any officials hiding in the corners, “Tax Collection ‘ere from London, with a special Christmas rebate!” When there was no reply, he turned to Jonathan with a grave expression. “Well then. Whoever IS in this ‘ere building, they’re not government.”

“Maybe they used to be,” he replied, quietly.

Before them, a simple wooden desk with a shaded lamp, a drab rectangular carpet, and a lone cushionless bench made up the little room’s contents. The floor and support beams were wood, Jonathan was grateful to see, but the rest was just moldy white paper over brick. It was cold. Not frigid like outside, but far colder than a building with an unlocked door should have been. The little fireplace by the bench was dark, and there was no sign of smoke or embers to suggest a recent flame. After looking down the one little hall that led out of the waiting room and to a staircase at the back, Wamuu blew on his potion again, and scowled a little at the results. “None on this floor. Either up, or down.”

“Is there a down?” Erina asked. No one answered.

“Well,” Speedwagon said, slowly, tipping his hat toward the staircase at the end of the hallway, “we know there’s an up at least.”

Erina shook her head, her expression growing more fearful by the minute. “This feels too deliberate,” she said.

Seconds slid past. The room seemed to grow colder, and even more silent, somehow.

“I’ll climb up through a window,” Wamuu finally said. “Climb the stairs when you hear me break the window. Whoever is waiting for you will be drawn away.”

The others nodded, Erina a few moments after Jonathan and Speedwagon. By the time she’d finished bobbing her head, Wamuu had already turned around and swished back out the door. Jonathan clenched his teeth, blowing out a ripple breath that turned into faint white steam. Behind him, he heard more deep inhalations, and sharp exhalations. Static tingled up his back, and the cold began to withdraw. He looked back over his shoulder. Speedwagon had one hand on the brim of his hat, and the other held at his side, near where Jonathan had seen him draw a hidden knife from. Erina, who had shifted to the back of the line, was brandishing her umbrella like a club. A faint, high pitched hum, like the sound of a wet finger on the rim of a glass goblet, started to resonate from the umbrella. Jonathan wondered if the sound had just been masked by the blizzard last time she’d sent her flow of power through it, and would have asked were he not concentrating on his own breathing.

More seconds. Jonathan’s heart rate picked up. Every hair on his body was standing on end. He felt not just warm, but hot.

Then, from above and behind them, there came the sound of breaking glass. Jonathan uncoiled his leg muscles and shot himself up the stairs, his heavy feet pounding off of every fourth step. The staircase spiraled only twice before launching him out onto another wood-paneled hallway floor. He raised his hands, fingers outstretched, ready to drive their tips into anything that moved, but there was nothing. He stopped so abruptly that Speedwagon nearly bumped into him at the top of the steps. Just an empty hallway with a door on either side and a drably curtained window at the end. He looked up and down, but there was really no need. The hallway wasn’t even tall enough to hide clinging or crouching enemies.

“Nothing at all?” Speedwagon gasped.

Jonathan shook his head, trying his hardest to maintain his ripple breathing in between words as he answered. “Wamuu’s concoction has never led us astray.” His eyes narrowed. “Behind one of the doors, then. Or perhaps on the roof.”

“Wait,” Erina said from below him on the stairs, “didn’t he say there were vampire animals?”

Speedwagon looked carefully down at the steps, as if peering through them. “Rats?”

“Vampire bats, if our opponent’s fond of wordplay,” Jonathan said dryly before pushing out the rest of his breath.

“I’m coming out,” Wamuu’s muffled voice sounded from behind the door on the left, making all three of them startle briefly before the door opened and the becloaked giant ducked through and straightened back up in the hallway. He was staring at the opposite door.

“That way, then?” Jonathan asked, following his glare. He advanced up to the door himself, letting Erina and Speedwagon follow. Behind the door Wamuu had come in through, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a rectangle-shaped room containing file cabinets, bookshelves, and a pair of windows, one of them shattered.

“Yes,” Wamuu answered, “and it must have heard us.”

Jonathan nodded. He accelerated his ripple-to-waves pattern, feeling the heat and static grow in his body once again as he gave Wamuu an inquiring look and pointed to himself. Wamuu nodded, and stepped aside. Heart rate picking up again, Jonathan grabbed the doorknob and threw the door open.

There was a small office with a single window at the back, and another door at the side. Beneath the window was a desk, behind which sat a gray-haired old woman with a dour expression and downcast eyes. She wore a black coat with the hood down, and had her hands under the desk.

Jonathan readied himself for the attack, but it didn’t come. The old woman remained still, looking downward behind the desk.

“Erm…hello?” He stepped inside the room, Wamuu’s massive feet thumping just behind him. He saw the woman’s arms twitch a barely perceptible amount, but otherwise she remained still. Cold. Unmoving. Silent. Just like everything else in Windknight’s Lot. Had he even seen her arms move at all? And, if he had, was that just the touch of rigor mortis on a recently dead corpse?

“I think I should send some ripples through that desk.”

Jonathan took another step inside, but then immediately stopped. Behind him, Wamuu stopped dead in his own tracks after moving to the side.

A hissing, fizzing sound came from beneath the desk. Spilling out from behind the desk, and piled against the wall on either side of the door, were bundles of red paper cylinders, each bound to a fuse going down into the floorboards.

“DYNAMITE!” Jonathan roared at the top of his lungs, nearly choking as he felt his heart rise toward his throat and his eyes go wide in shock and terror. “RUN!”

Behind him he heard Erina and Speedwagon’s shrieks and crashing feet. He started to turn back, but when he saw Speedwagon and Erina scrabbling for the door to the room with the broken window, he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it. Not in time. Not through that narrow door. Not without pushing the others out of his way.

Time seemed to slow down as he looked back into the office. There was another window, just behind the old woman at the desk. He felt a rush of wind in the hall behind him. Wamuu was doing something, but probably not fast enough. Jonathan would die. He was about to die, miles and miles from home, and only the others would even know what had happened to him, assuming they survived themselves.

No.

Teeth clenched harder than they’d ever been before, Jonathan charged. He heard the fuses burning beneath the floorboards under him as he shot across the room. The old woman jumped up from behind the desk, mouth open, arms raised, fangs and claws bared as she let out a horrible whistle, but Jonathan had been expecting that. He ignored her, except to suck in and push out the fastest ripple breath he had ever taken, so fast that it hurt his chest. He felt her claws tearing into his face and shoulder, but the pain and wetness were followed immediately by a burst of heat and a flash of fiery yellow light, and she whistled again as she let go. Jonathan jumped up at the window, slamming his left shoulder against the glass with all the weight of his body and as much force as his legs could muster behind it.

The shattering of glass. The deeper cold of the outside snow. And then an explosion.




TO BE CONTINUED ->

 

[MagnificentLilyWitch]

Crossposting:

Ooooo! Windknight’s Lot before Dio, that is another big change. So maybe Dio will berecuirted by Santana as a weapon or attack against Jojo. Maybe Jonathan won't even die on the boat this time and Joseph will have a grandfather.

Santana and/or his minion here has been sensible in their prep for ripple users it seems.

Your description of Windknight’s Lot's crater walls reminds my of Talabheim from warhammer fantasy. I'm suprised that it wasn't even more historically important now. After all unbrakable walls surrounding arable land is a defenders dream.

Speedwagon interacting with the ripple differently is interesting. As is maybe tying into his high blood tempreture and evil smelling abilities. A thrid magic system maybe?

 

[Bernkastel]

I've been enjoying this a lot. Thanks for writing this, Leila.

 

[Leila Hann]

10. Night Fever​

Even before her training under Swami Tonpetti and his disciples, Erina had learned to think quickly and act just as fast using whatever happened to be on hand. Her first three years of medical apprenticeship, before her formal degree and before the ripple, had largely been spent in tents and impromptu clinics without enough scalpels or syringes to go around. Treating diseases she’d barely heard of, and removing parasites she’d shuddered to even look at. Therefore, when she heard Jonathan’s cry of warning, she spent but a fraction of a second panicking before looking around for what was on hand. The open window, already broken by Wamuu, across the room behind her. She didn’t know what dynamite meant, in terms of specifics. How large of an explosion would that make? How long did it take to detonate? How far must one stand to be safe? Her imagination failed her, but her quickness of thought did not.

“Here!” She shouted at Speedwagon and Wamuu, as Jonathan dashed forward toward the opposite window. Her heart froze as she saw him descend into the very source of danger, but she had to have faith in him. He was so powerful. He had to survive. She managed to keep shouting as she ran in the opposite direction, forcing herself to look away. “The window!”

Speedwagon came running after her, the two of them thundering across the larger room full of filing cabinets and into the icy December wind. The ripple still fizzed and crackled through her body, and it took her but a single breath to return it to full strength. Wamuu had vanished, with only a gust of unnaturally strong indoor wind to mark his passing; she had to assume that the ancient being could save himself, somehow or other. There was nothing she could do for him. The idea of Wamuu dying was easier to entertain than Jonathan doing so, but the prospect still gave her a profound sense of loss. A four thousand year old man, nonhuman and yet perfectly human. How unlikely was it that she would ever meet such an entity again, and after having a chance to learn but so little? There was nothing she could do for him, though, and perhaps for Jonathan’s less-than-distinguished Londoner friend there was.

“Ripple to waves!” she snapped at him as they arrived at the window, “Breath in time with me, and grab on!”

She had no time to look behind her and make sure he was doing as instructed. She simply raised her left leg and put her foot down on the sill of the shattered window. Umbrella in hand. Speedwagon’s hands latched onto her waist just in time, but his grip was clumsy, knocking her down instead of letting her jump. As they tumbled across the sill, broken glass biting through her coat to slice flesh, she opened the umbrella and positioned her fingers just so around the handle, stabbing the shaft directly outward from her heart and up at the whirling sky.

Speedwagon’s extra weight would have overburdened her and dropped them both to break their bones against the frozen earth beneath the not-deep-enough snow two stories down. As luck would have it, the ear-shattering boom of the dynamite rent the air just then, and she felt the leading edge of the shockwave pull monstrously at the umbrella. She tightened her grip, arms burning and eyes tearing up. The brunt of the shockwave hit like a burning hot train car, breaking her ripple-to-waves and making her let out a stifled, choking gurgle.

Then, she felt snow and shingles under her, and collapsed onto them, hearing nothing but an unending ring that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. The one thing that gave her relief was the feeling of Speedwagon’s arms releasing her midsection, actively rather than in the manner of a corpse.

The cold chill of the snow, the burning pain of her wounds where the glass had cut her, and the vibrations from the rain of debris that fell across the rooftop all around helped anchor her to wakefulness and pull herself back. Debris still falling. That meant it had only been seconds, she hadn’t actually lost consciousness. Struggling up onto her hands and knees, she blinked some freezing tears away and looked back up, gritting her teeth against the painful ringing. She was on the roof of the one story cottage across the street from what had been the town hall. The larger building had been cored. Its roof was gone, the brick walls of its upper story blasted outward and shattered from within. Thick black smoke and weak orange flames rose from the splintered wood behind the walls. On the ground floor below, every single window pane had been shattered. On the gently slanted roof beside her, her umbrella lay open, more intact than she herself was. Speedwagon, who must have been shielded from more of the shockwave by virtue of hanging below her, had already stood back up, and was clutching his hat in front of him. His long hair was tattered and burnt, but otherwise he did not look seriously injured.

He looked down at her, and moved his mouth. For a moment, she wondered why he was whispering so quietly, and then for another moment panicked when she realized he wasn’t. Her experience caught up to her though, and she breathed an ash-flavored sigh of relief. She could still move all her fingers and toes. If the blast hadn’t been close enough to break any of them, then the ear damage wasn’t likely permanent either. Not for a ripple conductor, at least. Remembering that she had more serious injuries as well in the deep cuts across her midsection, she resumed her deep, rhythmic breathing and rose shakily to her feet. Speedwagon offered her a hand, which she gratefully took.

“Jonathan?” she asked him, still just barely hearing her own voice as the buzz and warmth of the ripple condensed around her wrists, stomach, and ears.

Speedwagon’s reply wasn’t audible enough to understand, but his expression and body language said something along the lines of “I don’t know.”

Trying not to stagger, Erina kept one hand over the warm, wet tear on the stomach of her coat and grabbed her umbrella with the other. Still keeping the ripple-to-waves flowing, she jumped off the roof and used the umbrella to slow her fall, so the shock of the landing wasn’t too agonizing for her cuts. Speedwagon’s cuts were all on his arms and the sides of his chest; he dropped to the snowy ground beside her with much less difficulty. Bent forward a little, she trotted as fast as she could manage around the side of the smoking, smouldering town hall, Speedwagon beside her, eyes open as wide as possible as she scanned the snow for a muscular human shape. By the time they made it around the corner to the back side of the building, the side whose lake-facing window Jonathan had jumped through, she could finally hear the crackle of the flames and the crunching of their footsteps over the less-painful-than-before ringing. She spotted him in the fluttering shadows of the smoke and firelight, sprawled out in the snow some yards from the building, little melted pits around bits of brick and wood debris all around him. Wamuu stood over him. The nightman’s cloak was torn and singed, and its hood down. His hair was too short to be too badly disarrayed, but it and his normally gleaming headdress were both full of ash and stone dust. Most disturbingly, a long, jagged wooden beam was stuck through the right side of his abdomen, an end of it protruding from his front and back.

His expression showed pain, but only a little.

“Are you…is he…?” Erina looked frantically up and down from Wamuu to the writhing form of Jonathan. He looked like he was breathing, at least. She ran toward them, forcing her own pain down as she hurried to assess Jonathan’s condition. His head was turned aside, one half of his crystalline chin and gentle lips exposed to the sky and fluttering snow. His hair, black with the faintest undercurrent of blue like a clear midnight sky, was everywhere. There were no injuries that she could see, but the snow around him was stained and half-melted from beneath with warm blood. Thank god he seemed to be breathing normally, at least.

“I began to fear the worst for you,” Wamuu’s voice was quieter than it should have been, but getting clearer with each syllable, “you must not have heard my call.” He gestured down at Jonathan, while giving his own stomach an aggravated grimace. “Tend to him. My own wound is minor; the debris did not pierce my spine.”

Putting her bafflement over Wamuu’s physiology aside, Erina sunk to her knees in the snow beside Jonathan, holding her torso straight upright and her arms pointing rigidly down from her heart and toward him. Five of her fingertips pressed themselves against the bare skin of his face, while the other hand twisted below his collar to press its digits against the top of his muscle-covered spine. Breathe with me, she thought urgently, unable to speak aloud as she devoted her mouth entirely to building up the ripples in her bloodstream, please, Jonathan, remember to breathe like I taught you. I can’t heal you alone.

As she silently cursed her tiny lungs and miniscule blood supply, Wamuu’s voice brought her gaze back up, toward the cloud of night-shadowed steam that roiled above the lake. “Enemies. Prepare yourselves.”

Squinting through the darkness at the swirling fog, Erina saw them. Dark shapes, scuttling and crawling up the shore on all fours, bodies held low to the snow. She thought they were animals at first, but a sudden crackle and flare-up from the town hall revealed dripping wet clothing, hair hanging from heads, and boots on their scrabbling hind feet. A human shouldn’t have been able to move that way, but there was no mistaking them now. Perhaps realizing that they’d been spotted, the three villagers that had scuttled furthest from the lake leapt abruptly to their feet, standing so quickly she almost startled, and ran off to the sides to flank them.

As Wamuu conjured a wall of wind between the encircling monsters and themselves, Erina stared frantically back down at Jonathan. The ringing in her ears was gone now, making way for the rising wind and Speedwagon’s babbling screams. Jonathan’s lips had parted, blood dripping out from between them. He wasn’t choking, so it must have been from a cut inside his mouth, but his breathing was unchanged. From both sides, she began to hear a horrible whistling as the vampires drew nearer. Damnit Jonathan, you need to help me! He didn’t respond to her silent urging. Just flexed his lips a tiny bit, and shivered. He breathes the ripples to waves on reflex now. I’ve seen him do it. It’s in his muscle memory.

Another whistle, closer and more piercing, from the left. Wamuu and Speedwagon were shouting to one another.

Erina took her fingers off of Jonathan’s back, and seized his head in both hands, tilting it higher above the snow. As he gasped and gurgled, she blinked away a fresh pair of tears and bent down, pressing her lips against his.

Breathe out.

She sucked a lungful of sour, used air out of him.

Breathe in.

She held his nose, and pulled her head back. He sucked a loud, deep breath in through his mouth.

She released his nostrils, and – after spitting out his blood and taking in a deep mouth breath herself that left just barely enough room in her chest to take on more – returned her lips to his own and continued inhaling.

…​

He had seen JoJo and Erina infuse their ripples into handheld items, and Erina had told them about Indian monks who could do that well enough to keep the item charged for a short time after dropping or throwing it. Unfortunately, Robert Edward Orville Speedwagon had only just recovered from his unorthodox lung surgery, and had little idea of how to do any of that at all. Which meant his hat, brilliant piece of headgear though it might be, was useless here, and he wasn’t keen on jumping through the wall of wind toward the whistling, scuttling horrors OR on staying put and waiting for another to produce a firearm. Wamuu was pulling enough snow up into the vortex to make it hard to see through, but sooner or later there’d be a lucky knife, stone, or bullet.

Crouching lower to the ground, he looked back at where Erina was kneeling over JoJo. JoJo’s bulging chest was moving in time with Erina’s strenuous mouth-to-mouth breathing now, and his arms – so inexplicably graceful despite their bulk – began carving angel wings into the softened snow. It looked like he’d be okay, or at least not worse off than the rest of them in the unlikely event that they survived the next few minutes. He averted his eyes and returned them to the monsters that surrounded them, and the other monster (meant in the good way, of course) who kept them at bay.

“Wamuu!” He shouted over the din of monstrous whistles and howling winds, gritting his teeth against the stray, snow-filled currents as he moved closer to the giant with the whirling chains. How well could vampires hear? Enough to distinguish his words over the din, from where they skulked? He’d have to just hope not. “I’m going to try and slip back in! Let me through!” The nightman’s eyes flickered over to focus on Speedwagon, and he gave a very slight nod of his head. The circle of howling winds moved just a foot or so toward the blasted, smoking town hall, rising in loudness and pitch until it resembled the screams of the vampires themselves as it began grazing the brick wall and throwing snow in through one of the shattered windows. Staying near the ground, praying silently to the god he’d never really believed in since he’d needed both sets of fingers to count off his age that the snow-filled wind would hide his movements, he half ran and half crawled back toward the window. It was a struggle to stay on his knees against the rebounding wind once he reached the wall, but at least there was no glass left in the window frame to work around when he pulled himself up and climbed inside as quickly as he could manage, collapsing onto the rubble strewn floor inside.

The ceiling was gone, of course, and not a single inside wall of the ground floor hadn’t been splintered to head-height or lower, so Speedwagon could barely even tell where each room had begun and ended. How many bits of vampire are mixed up in this dust and ash right under me, I wonder? He hadn’t seen the elderly woman who had set off the explosion since he and Erina turned their backs and fled, and if her body was fortified to around the same degree as Jack the Ripper’s rather than more…well, there probably wasn’t two fingers left of the dame to rub together. Better for her this way of course, and even moreso for himself, but the thought that he was inhaling bits of human along with this acrid smoke still disconcerted him. He’d breathed much worse before, but it was the spirit of the thing.

Ah, right. Breathing. He really hoped this would become instinct soon, the way it seemed to have for JoJo. The smoke wasn’t as bad here by the window where the gale still blew in fresh winter air from outside, and Speedwagon took the opportunity to get three good ripple breaths in and out before getting up and creeping toward the door. A few fires still crackled away in sheltered corners of the hollowed out building, but he could tell the heat of the flames from the heat of his body, and the second one was rising a lot faster alongside the electric tingle.

As luck would have it, he heard the crunch of snow outside the door frame just as he was sidling up beside it. Just barely audible over the fire and the howling storm across the floor, but this was a sound he’d trained his ears to pick up on for a long time. He couldn’t smell the thing in this fast moving air, but hopefully that meant it couldn’t smell any of the blood left on him either. He waited for the next footfall to bring his opponent right outside the door, drew in another deep breath that sent a stabbing pain into the bottom of his chest (perhaps he’d been just a touch overconfident when he’d told the others he’d healed completely), and forced it out abruptly while leaping through the door with his arms forward and hands and forearms raised upward. He barely had time to register the sight of the red haired young man with a pitchfork clutched in his hands before he brought his forearms down and he jabbed his fingertips into the boy’s head and throat. The boy screamed. The feeling of flames erupting around his own fingers and human flesh disintegrating under them made Speedwagon scream almost as loud himself. The young man, quite a handsome fellow until now, leaped back away from him, dropping his pitchfork to the snow as the skin and muscle peeled away off from around his mouth and neck. The half-burnt mouth opened, but no whistle came forth from behind those jagged fangs. The burning wretch lunged at him, its own clawed hands outstretched, and Speedwagon ducked low and stabbed his fingers out to intercept its own. Red hot pain exploded through his left hand as one of his own fingers broke with the impact, but both the vampire’s hands went up in flames. Speedwagon stumbled back into the building away from the blindly flailing, burning demon as its fire-covered claws came toward him. His foot caught on the rubble, and he fell flat on his back. Luckily, the wounded monster didn’t approach further. Speedwagon raised his head just in time to see it limping back the way it had come, out into the night.

He let his head fall back on the floor as he breathed an ash-flavored sigh of relief. He must’ve not realized that was all I had in me. I hope I hurt him enough for the others to finish off without trouble.

Speedwagon’s head was still spinning from the impact, and the iron-hard agony in his hand still seizing it up, when he heard more whistling vampire shrieks from just outside, followed by a burst of cold air that doused the nearby flames and covered him in a layer of powdery snow as it gushed in through the doorway. He used his good hand for support as he raised himself halfway up into a sitting position, and through his teary and smoke-filled eyes he managed to distinguish Wamuu standing out in the snow, grabbing someone in both hands and tearing. A moment later, Jonathan stumbled into view beside him, meeting another attacker with an outstretched arm that covered her in yellow flames.

Letting out a sigh of exhaustion and relief, Speedwagon found his hat again and put it back on his head before replacing his good hand on the floor to push himself the rest of the way up. By the time he’d gotten back on his feet and stepped out into the snow, the unnatural winds had ended, and Jonathan and Wamuu were standing back to back, looking around for any more attackers. Erina stood a few feet away, breathing heavily, looking near ready to drop from exhaustion.

“There you are,” Wamuu said, turning his chain-hung head toward Speedwagon as he stepped out onto the snow, “your diversion worked perfectly. The others broke off to investigate when you brought that one down, which gave us an opening to push through.”

“Are you alright?” JoJo asked, pulling away from Wamuu and taking a step toward him. His voice was strained, and his gait slow and painful, but he barely even seemed concerned about his own condition. Part of Speedwagon wanted to think it was just confidence in his own healing powers, but no, that wasn’t it at all. He’d been no different when they’d met Eliza, before he had any powers save his damned near unbelievable strength. This was who Jonathan had always been.

“Right as rain,” Speedwagon reassured him, forcing a pained smile, “aside from this one finger. I’ve still got nine more, though.” He took in another ripple breath, the pain in his lower chest distracting him just a tiny, blessed little from his searing hand. Around them, the snowfall was starting to pick up, as if to make up for Wamuu ending his wind spell. “You alright yourself?”

JoJo nodded yes, his dark hair flapping loose and disheveled. His hair had gotten longer since Speedwagon had first laid eyes on the man. Growing it on purpose, or been too distracted to keep it cut? Probably the latter, though it wasn’t a bad look for him at all. “I’ll be fine now. I’m still healing myself though; why don’t you put that hand to my chest while I do?”

Speedwagon felt even hotter than his ripple-filled blood was already making him. “Well, if it’ll slow your own healing down I can wait, though I’d appreciate it regardless.”

JoJo stepped forward and raised his tattered shirt, exposing his lightly tanned torso with its rippling muscles and gently sloping frame to the snow flecked winter air. Speedwagon gave him an obliged nod and pressed his burning hand to Jonathan’s skin, electricity tingling into his hand and all the way up his arm as JoJo opened his mouth and filled his chest. Speedwagon matched Jonathan’s rhythm with his own, looking carefully away from Erina until his finger was nearly painless and Jonathan was pulling his shirt back down.

“Well then,” Erina said, still panting a little as Jonathan and Speedwagon withdrew from each other, “if that was all of them, where do we go next?”

Wamuu produced his flask, and tested the ripples. “There are no more in the village.” He shook his head. There were cuts and scratches all over him, as well as a bite mark full of fang-punctures on his neck, but he seemed hardly the worse for them. There was only a wet patch around a tatter in his cloak where the wooden pole had been a minute ago. “The mask wearer will either hide from us now, or attack again.”

“Could they be hiding in the lake?” Jonathan asked, casting his gaze toward the fog-covered water that the vampires had crawled forth from.

“Maybe. I don’t think so.”

“Where is everyone?” Speedwagon asked, after the snow fell silently for a long moment. The others turned to him. “Even if he can turn a whole village at once, why wouldn’t he have sent them all just now instead of only a few?”

“Perhaps they’ve killed all the others for their blood,” Jonathan said, looking downward.

Erina shook her head. “How could no one have heard about it if that many people went missing all at once?”

Wamuu looked up from his flask again. “No more nearby. We should circle the lake. I’d rather find them before more of them find us.”

…​

The steam’s refreshing warmth didn’t last long. Once her clothes were damp through and through and her hair all stuck to her skin, Erina found the winter chill reaching into her even through the heated fog, and she needed to fall back into ripple-to-waves to keep herself warm. Even that wasn’t working as well as it should. Too much humidity in the air, she was sure, her lungs putting in more work for less air, and even less ripple in between the water vapor particles. The fact that she could barely see further than five yards in front of her, and that she kept half-thinking she saw menacing shapes form in the mist, didn’t help either. Her one reassurance was in the quarter or so of her field of vision occupied by Jonathan’s back and shoulder as he strode just ahead of her, keeping himself between her body and the steaming water.

The two other sets of footfalls in the slush beside her were less comforting. Erina still wasn’t sure what to think about that Speedwagon character, thief, pimp, and possible murderer that he was. She’d spent much of her childhood being warned about strangers that fit his description far too closely, musical proclivities aside. As for Wamuu…she had been enchanted and curious about the nightman at first, and still was she supposed. But after watching what he’d done to the fallen vampires. How nonchalantly, almost dismissively he’d looked at her from over his blood-covered lips as he’d said “Eating daymen is distasteful, but I need to heal myself and there’s no other meat in sight,” well. At least she’d found it slightly reassuring that Speedwagon, like Jonathan, refused to watch as it happened.

What did that say about her, then, that she hadn’t? Just her jadedness after so many years in the tent hospital and emergency room, or something that went deeper?

The explosion and subsequent battle had brought her nearer to death than she’d ever been in her life. She was shaken, she knew, frightened and stretched thin. She concentrated on the rhythmic harmony of her own and Jonathan’s fog-laden breaths, clinging on to the warm and vibrant electricity of the ripple to anchor herself, when Wamuu stopped in place and turned his still-bloody visage toward the others.

“I hear something ahead,” he whispered, just loudly enough to make Speedwagon, Jonathan, and herself stop as well. “One small creature, hiding in the bushes above the shore.”

Erina looked back in front of them. She could barely make out the shape of the foliage rising from a muddy bank above the springwater, through the nighttime steam. Wamuu stepped up to the front of the group, and blew on his open hip flask once again. His expression grew quizzical. “It’s not a vampire.”

Jonathan advanced beside him, standing just far enough inland to the left to let herself and Speedwagon see between the two larger men. “It’s most likely an animal, then. A dog or a sheep that’s run away with its owner gone, perhaps.”

Wamuu’s chains swayed and jangled as he shook his head. “It didn’t sound like hooves, and its breathing isn’t a dog’s.”

Erina pulled back behind Jonathan and laid her hands on his hot, steam and snowmelt-wetted back, working her lungs harder against the moisture so she could help him heal again. Beside her, she was aware of Speedwagon gliding silently up the shore’s incline and removing his bowler hat, which he held beside him like a boomerang ready to throw. Were those blades she was seeing above its brim? She could have sworn those hadn’t been there a minute ago. It was Jonathan, of course, who raised his voice above the fluttering snowflakes and deafening silence. “Hello?” he called out, putting a hand by his mouth as he peered at the bushes, “Is there anyone there? We’re here to help.”

The whispers of the wind and the flutter of the snowflakes in the steam were the only reply. Then, just as Erina was about to call out as well, a tiny, childish voice answered, barely audible from this distance. “Tell Musgrave there’s nobody here!”

Jonathan looked back at her over his craggy shoulder, wet bangs hanging just above his eyes as he regarded her as if asking for help.

“Musgrave?” She whispered. Jonathan just shook his head, expression blank.

From his perch above the bank, Speedwagon took it upon himself to ask “What’s a Musgrave?”

Erina sighed, and then stepped aside to shout out around Jonathan’s arm. “Who’s Musgrave? Is he the one the…” she almost said ‘bad people,’ but stopped herself in the nick of time. Were this child’s friends and neighbors among the vampires, now? His siblings? His parents? “…ones who have lost their minds are listening to?”

Slowly, a small, sharp-chinned head emerged from among the leaves. Erina couldn’t make out the boy’s features through the darkness and mist, but she thought he had dark hair, and from his size and the depth of his voice she’d place his age at around eleven. His eyes were wide. Too wide. She couldn’t be sure with this visibility, but she thought he was trembling, either from cold or fear.

“Who are you?” The child asked. Then, before anyone could answer, “Where did you come from? Why are you here?”

Before she or Jonathan could answer, Speedwagon came a little ways down the slope and lowered himself onto one knee in the slush, holding his hat much more loosely in front of himself now. “Well, my name is Robert, but everyone calls me Speedwagon. These are me mates JoJo, Wamuu, and Miss Pendleton. I’m from London myself, but the rest are from all around. And, well, we heard this village was having a spot of trouble and we came here to help if we could.” He bowed his head, letting his long hair shift saucily over his shoulder. “What can I call you?”

The child emerged partway from the bushes, crawling on his own scraped hands and ragged knees. His eyes remained wide and unblinking, but when a rise in the wind cleared the steam a little she saw that he was holding his head higher, more hopeful. “My name’s Franklin,” the boy said. He paused before continuing, so quietly that Erina had to strain her ears to hear. “But most people call me Poco.”

“Well,” Speedwagon’s head bobbed up and down and he used his free hand to beckon the child forward, “Poco it is, then. Could you perhaps help us find the others?”

Poco hesitated. Speedwagon remained squatting. Moreso than even when she’d heard him singing, Erina was struck by how very unthreatening he suddenly seemed. Did that just make Speedwagon even more dangerous than she’d thought? What did he usually use this particular skillset for?

As she watched, Poco finally came the rest of the way out of the bushes and rose, shakily, to his feet. She’d been right about his age, he had to be somewhere between ten and twelve years old. His skin was a few shades darker than one would expect from a typical English villager, and something in his face made her think of Spanish ancestry. She supposed that would explain the nickname, along with him being a little thin and scrawny for his height. “Musgrave took everyone to the castle,” he said as he stepped up to within arm’s reach of Speedwagon. He kept his eyes mostly on the crouching Londoner, but glanced up at Erina and the others every few moments. Now that he was closer, she was sure he was shivering with cold as well as fear; he was soaked head to toe, and half covered in twigs and mud. “He does something to people that makes them like him.”

Erina stepped up beside Speedwagon. “If we don’t dry his clothes, he’s going to get hypothermia. Before any more questions, perhaps you could…?” she gave him what she hoped was a meaningful look. Fortunately, he got her meaning quickly, and tipped the hand with his hat in it at her with a smile before returning his attention to Poco. “Say Poco, you wouldn’t mind giving me your hand?”

The child looked more cautious again for a moment, before nervously raising his hand. Speedwagon began breathing in through his mouth. His pacing was as terrible as ever, his breaths irregular and his posture horribly inefficient, but now was not the time to correct him. At least, not in front of Poco. Soon, she felt the heat and saw the slush around the crouching Speedwagon begin to thin out and run. Poco looked up at the smiling man in wonder, and then stepped forward and let him pull him against his chest. A look of relief immediately came across the child’s face as his skin was warmed and his clothes began to dry.

As Jonathan stepped up beside her and put his own arm around her, and she leaned in and did the same, Erina kept her eyes on Speedwagon. Someone from his background – particularly someone so shifty, not to mention loud and intrusive – becoming so soft, so quickly? At this point, she was sure Speedwagon wasn’t just playing a character, any more than he had been when she’d seen him play peekaboo with his infant nephew before they’d left his sister’s respectable establishment.

Erina Pendleton had never before met a person that she would trust with her children but not with her purse.

“Alright then,” Speedwagon said as he released the much warmer and dryer child, “could you spare us some more details on this Musgrave chap and where he’s got everyone?”

Poco nodded, looking much sharper and more energetic now, keeping his eyes on Speedwagon alone. “He and the…the people he made like him…locked everyone up in the dragon tower. Erm, that’s the square tower on the right side of the castle. I got out through the tunnel.”

“Tunnel?” Jonathan asked, stepping up a little closer behind Speedwagon. Erina took a hold of his arm and pulled him back a little; she doubted crowding the child was going to make him more talkative, and Speedwagon seemed to have this as it was.

“Yeah,” Poco said, looking at Jonathan for just a moment before returning his attention to Speedwagon kneeling in front of him, “Erm…its hidden by the balcony door. I was the only one who could fit through when they weren’t looking, and who could also climb down the wall.”

Jonathan spoke again, keeping a comfortable distance this time. “I’m not sure all of us are up for that sort of climb.” Indeed, Erina hadn’t had a good look at the castle since they entered the crater valley, but she’d seen how high the towers were at the time, and the thought of an eleven year old child climbing down one – let alone unsupervised – wasn’t a comforting one. If anything, she was bothered by how Jonathan and Speedwagon didn’t react to that. “How else can we get up there?”

Poco shook his unkempt head. “Just the stairs from down below, I think. But that’s where they’re guarding.”

Erina turned around and stepped up to Wamuu. “Do you have any idea,” she asked, “why he might be doing this?”

“Possibly,” Wamuu said, barely looking at her. He raised his voice so the child could hear him and locked his eyes on him. “Poco.” Poco looked up at him, and then recoiled a little behind Speedwagon again. “When did Musgrave capture your people?”

“Um…last night, just before dawn. He and Mrs. Potter, Mr. Phillipson, Jenny, Mayor Smith. Just barged into the house with rifles, with these big sharp teeth showing, and they made us walk. They gave us food today, but then this evening he…Musgrave…took Branford, Mrs. Cotton, and Old Jacob and did the…thing...that he does to them and then sent them away.” He paused. His eyes looking dewy again. “He also sent some of the ones he’d already changed, who were guarding us. He only left the Mayor and Mrs. Potter. That’s why I thought I could get through the tunnel without one of them noticing.”

Wamuu folded his arms, expression stony and grim. Poco hid further behind Speedwagon, but the giant’s eyes were no longer on him. “I feared as much. Our quarry must have prepared for our attack after the man and horse I killed in the tunnel didn’t report back. I returned to the tunnel before sunrise. If he only noticed shortly before dawn, I wouldn’t have seen them. He’s keeping the prisoners as reserve forces. Whenever he learns he’s lost another group of slaves, he’ll turn more of them to bring his army back to full size immediately.”

Erina felt her blood go cold, even through the heat of the ripple she’d been keeping active with her slow, constant breathing rhythm. “What’s full size?”

“We killed four,” Jonathan whispered, his face ashen as he turned his back to Poco and Speedwagon, “Speedwagon killed another. There was one more who set off the explosives. At least two still in the castle guarding the prisoners.”

Erina clenched her teeth, nodding slowly. At least eight at a time. Jonathan had told her what that Lamkin creature had said to him, about smaller bodies being easier to reanimate. How many more or less could there be if this new demon chief used small children himself? How many adult human vampires was a horse worth, as far as his powers were concerned? How many rats or pigeons or dogs to a human?

“That’s six down, and most likely six more he’ll kill and enslave by the time we reach the tower.” Jonathan didn’t need to say anything more. Every vampire slain on the way to Musgrave would mean one more victim.

Speedwagon looked back at the three of them, and then at the suspiciously staring Poco again. Erina stepped aside, so that she, Jonathan, and Wamuu could face the child. “Here’s what, Poco,” Speedwagon said, “we’re going to try and help as many of you Windknight lot as we possibly can. Do you perchance know a way we can get to that castle’s doorway without them spotting us?”

Poco looked nervously back over Speedwagon’s shoulder at the others. His eyes happened to catch Erina’s. She did her best to look reassuring, affecting the same businesslike confidence she used to get taken seriously at the hospital. The child stared at her, as if accepting a silent promise that he’d judge her very harshly for breaking, and then looked back at Speedwagon.

“I think so.”

…​

Another villager turned for each vampire they would be forced to destroy. Six innocent lives already on his, Wamuu’s, and Speedwagon’s hands, most likely, and god only knew how many more to come before this mask was shattered.

Poco led them through the bushes along the steaming lakeside, where the wind was concentrating the fog against the muddy bank and snow-lined hedges in a manner that would hopefully hide them at least for part of the way. Erina and Speedwagon ducked down. Jonathan, and Wamuu at the trailing end of the procession behind the others, had to bend over almost double to stay concealed. The grass and mud and slushy water was building up on his hands as well as his feet and knees.

How long would it take Musgrave to learn of it, if they slew more during their approach? Not long, Jonathan realized, if animals too were among his minions. Jonathan looked warily up at the dark and snow-streaked sky, barely visible through the steam, and wondered if a vampire owl or heron were searching from it right now, ready to communicate each of its fallen brethren back to a watcher in the tower with some aerial motion. Vampires could see in the dark far better than humans, at least as well as Wamuu himself could. There would be no reason for him not to do it. Even if the fog succeeded at hiding them for now, it would not protect them the entire way.

He looked over his shoulder at Erina. She looked wet, and on edge, but not as miserable as he’d feared. She caught his eyes, and the look she gave him through the steaming mist was one of concern. Just like his own. He smiled, she smiled back, and they continued after Poco. The mist grew thinner, and the bushes drier and snowier. Then, just as Jonathan began to wonder if the boy was leading them around in circles, the winter shrubbery gave way to a flat stone wall standing high up into the overhead darkness.

“Here,” Poco said, indicating the wall with his head, “the main door’s further along, but the broken side tower here has a door you can climb up to really easy. It’s on the broken deck, maybe twice as high off the ground as Mister Joestar or Mister Wamuu.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know if he’s guarding it?” Speedwagon asked, crouching under the hedges just opposite the boy.

Poco shook his head.

Jonathan shook his own as well. “If he’s been here for this long, he must have noticed any openings that can be seen from the ground outside. He’ll be guarding that door, if he has the manpower for it.”

Speedwagon looked back at him. “What are you proposing, then?” When Jonathan didn’t reply, Speedwagon looked to Wamuu, and then to Erina, crouched in the snowy bushes behind him. Jonathan moved out of the way so they could all face one another, hoping he wasn’t shaking and crushing the bushes too obviously from outside.

“You mentioned rifles before,” Erina said, “but nobody shot at us back in the village.” She looked up at Wamuu and Speedwagon. “Or, did they? My ears were ringing.”

“It’s probably a limited supply of rifles,” Jonathan mused aloud, “or just not wanting to get them wet in that fog. If he thought he could get away with not using them during that ambush, he’ll certainly have changed his mind by now.”

“I can survive a few bullets,” Wamuu said, “but I don’t know if everyone can.”

Jonathan looked back out at the stone wall, a few yards from the edge of the tall bushes. Bare snow. A clean line of sight from the towers and battlements, or from any exposed doorway overhead, at least for a creature to whom darkness meant nothing. The snowfall had evened out, medium sized flakes continuing to waft downward through the near blackness at a persistent rate. If only the weather were a bit worse, they could trust it to shield them from vampire eyes.

“Wamuu,” Jonathan said, “you can stir the snow up to hide.”

“I can’t move very quickly while I do that,” Wamuu replied, “and the wind would make it hard for the others to climb. I’d have suggested it myself otherwise.”

Poco stared past Jonathan at Wamuu, eyes widening at the mention of wind control.

“Well, yes,” Jonathan said, “but do you think our enemies know that?”

He felt all eyes on him. He wasn’t sure, for a moment, if he’d explained himself poorly, or if he’d simply overlooked some glaring flaw.

“Oh, I like this,” Speedwagon finally said.

Wamuu was smiling, and nodding his head admiringly.

“It’ll be like the town hall, then,” Erina said, “you climb up and use the snow for cover. This Musgrave person will probably think we’re all in there, and he only has so many vampires to send. And the rest of us…”

“Dance right in through the front gate,” Speedwagon finished for her.

“What about Poco, though?” Erina asked.

“Three choices,” Wamuu said.

“We’re not leaving him outside,” Erina growled at him, just as Jonathan and Speedwagon both started opening their mouths as well.

“Two choices, then.” Wamuu caught Jonathan giving him an interrogative little glare, and seemed to catch his meaning. “Leaving him outside while we attack would be safer from the vampires. I forgot that these temperatures could be dangerous for a dayman who cannot channel the ripple.”

“What about ripples?” Poco whispered to Speedwagon.

Speedwagon gave him a placating gesture. “You’ll see in just a bit, sonny.”

“He does know the way to where he’s holding the villagers,” Erina mused, “but letting you take him is probably safer.” She gave Wamuu an icy glare. “As long as you don’t forget we need oxygen or something like that.”

“Most of the daymen I’ve fought alongside lived in warmer places. The topic rarely came up.”

They spent a few minutes asking Poco how one might get from the main entrance to the dragon tower. Then, Speedwagon smiled at him. “Alright chap. Climb up on the big man’s shoulders. No, the other big man.”

…​

They approached the door at the top of the winding, coffin-narrow staircase. Jonathan in the lead, of course, with Poco struggling to keep pace without holding up Speedwagon and Erina behind him. The last of the tiny windows was many feet below now, and the air was dusty and smelled of mold and must. Jonathan had to force his mouth and lungs to admit the foul air as he built his ripple charge back up.

“You should hide on one of the balconies back downstairs,” Jonathan told Poco, looking down the staircase over his shoulder while he kept his torchlight on the stone portal ahead.

The boy shook his dusty, sweat and snowmelt dampened head. Another gunshot echoed up from somewhere in the castle below where Wamuu had been continuing his distraction after they regrouped and parted again. Poco flinched at the sound, but he didn’t look away from Jonathan.

“Poco,” Jonathan tried again, “I’m not sure you understand just how dangerous this is going to be.”

Poco stared at him. “I was already in there.”

Jonathan sighed. “Well, yes, but there wasn’t any fighting going on before you escaped, was there?”

The boy shifted a little in place, but still didn’t look down. “Not really,” he said, “there wasn’t any more fighting by the time they brought us to the castle.”

Further down the stairs, Speedwagon gasped and tried to hide his grimace behind his hands. Even in the darkness, it just wasn’t possible.

“But,” Poco continued, “that doesn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous! My sister’s still in there, and I’m going back in as well!”

Jonathan held back a grimace of his own as another gunshot echoed up, followed an instant later by the high, piercing whistle of a wounded vampire. Wamuu had said he’d try to avoid killing any, but he’d also warned that keeping himself alive might make this difficult. Had any more vampires been destroyed, since they’d entered the castle? Was Poco’s sister, or his mother or father, now being transformed? Had they already been, as a consequence of the battle back at the town hall?

It then occurred to Jonathan that Poco had been very specific in mentioning his sister, but not his parents. He felt his blood run cold even through the ripple heat he’d built in his veins as he looked at the child’s leaf and snowmelt covered hair and unblinking eyes. No wonder he’s so insistent on this. She might be his only surviving family.

“Alright,” Jonathan said, nodding his head at the boy in heartfelt respect, “just try to stay behind us.” Before he turned back to the door, he caught Speedwagon’s expression as he regarded Poco. He looked almost ready to tear up. Kinship of a sort, Jonathan supposed. He made eye contact with Erina, who silently nodded her head, an unspoken, businesslike agreement. He could see the fear in her eyes, but it was bound tightly in chains of determination. And of faith. Faith in me, Jonathan realized as she reached out over Poco’s shoulder and laid her ripple-tingling fingers on his free left hand. He didn’t know how that made him feel. Honored? Afraid? Ecstatic? Unworthy? All of them at once?

Slowly, he turned back to the door, and reached for the rusty iron handle. It opened far more easily than it should have. It had seen use recently. Perhaps it had even been oiled. Behind it, his and Erina’s lamplights fell across dark flagstones and floating dust. Jonathan felt a cold draft from somewhere, but there wasn’t so much as a hint of moon or starlight. He craned his head around, knees bent and ready to spring, breath filling his body with ripple. After a long moment, the lamplight fell on a set of rust and dirt covered iron bars, and a huddle of shivering bodies on the floor behind them.

“I’m holding another bomb,” a clear, clipped voice echoed around the inky black tower room, “and I’ll be throwing it into the cell should you take another step forward.”

Jonathan’s head jerked around as he tried to locate the speaker. It was no use; with that echo, he could have been anywhere in the murky chamber. If only Wamuu were here with his potion. Poco’s hand pulled at Jonathan’s shirt, as if the boy was afraid of letting him advance. Erina shined her own lamp higher in the space beneath Jonathan’s raised arm. The light pierced further behind the bars, illuminating half a dozen of the coated and scarfed villagers huddled together for warmth. A few pale, half-lit faces stood out against the shivering wool and trembling limbs. An old white haired woman staring back at them like a deer at a train’s headlamps. A burly man with a dark mustache who seemed to be trying to comfort someone obscured by the darkness. A teenaged girl who looked a lot like Poco, standing with bent knees and raised hands as if to catch any incoming explosives and throw them back.

“He won’t actually do it!” Speedwagon shouted from behind Erina and Poco. “He does that, and he’s got nothing left to throw at us!”

“Killing them would leave me with scarce little,” the voice replied before Jonathan could, “that much is true. But I know you’re trying to rescue them. I haven’t been able to raise any more since you entered the castle. This means you’ve been taking pains to disable rather than kill. What reason could you have for that, if not to disincentivize me from using my remaining supply?”

There was a wry, rattling chuckle. Like a laugh that had had all the moisture drained out of it and replaced with dust and bone ash.

“So then. We each have something the other wants. I know at least one of you is a gentleman of breeding and refinement. Surely, we can parley?”

“Well, will you listen to that,” Speedwagon said, “I’m a man of breeding and refinement! Wish I’d have known.” Erina, whose ear he had been shouting near, put her free hand to it and gave him a half-panicked glare. Speedwagon whispered an apology.

“You’re named Musgrave I presume, sir?” Jonathan spoke.

There was a sharp pause before the voice continued. “How did you…well, if you’ve learned my name then I suppose there’s little I can do about it at this point. Other than killing you, of course, but I’ve already given that my best effort.”

“I’d give you perfect marks,” Jonathan said wryly.

“Hah!” The laugh was sharper, and hoarser. It had an unguarded, wild sound to it that the voice hadn’t shown before. It also, Jonathan was sure, came from a few paces ahead of him and straight upward by the ceiling. Behind himself, he heard Speedwagon sniff sharply. “Marks, ah? Brings back memories from long before I fell under the devil’s sway.”

The voice grew cooler again, and was masked once more by the echo. Now that he knew what to listen for, however, Jonathan was sure he heard a faint scratching coming from above, as of fingernails against crumbling stone. He followed it a few paces to the left, but made sure to keep his head still and his eyes pointing straight ahead. He tried to think of how to signal his discovery to Speedwagon and Erina without the vampire noticing, but nothing came to him. Keeping his ripple breathing going while also listening to the tiny scrabbling sounds was so distracting.

Suddenly, something occurred to Jonathan. Something that nearly made him drop his lantern.

“Wait…Musgrave? Matthew Musgrave?”

Jonathan’s ripple breathing slowed, fumbled. Behind him, Erina whispered something, but Jonathan could hear nothing but his own heartbeat.

The voice in the darkness did not speak again for a long moment. When it did, its tone was carefully businesslike. “Ah, of course. You would be familiar with my work, Mister Joestar.”

Jonathan nodded his head, thinking as hard as he ever had while he struggled to keep his eyes away from where he knew Professor Musgrave lurked. The level of unreality that fell over him, the sense of the nightmare reaching out and consuming his old life bite by bite, there weren’t even words to describe it. Jonathan forced himself to stay in the present. To keep Musgrave talking, and judge the distances. “I read your publication on archaeological solutions to the contradictory documentation of the Hundred Years War. Everyone in my class must have.”

Behind him, he heard Speedwagon muffle a grunt as Erina elbowed him in the chest. Jonathan weighed the risks carefully before looking over his shoulder. Speedwagon, who he supposed had started to interject something, was glaring at Erina ruefully. For her own part, Erina gave Jonathan a desperate look, both questioning and terrified. Poco just looked frightened and confused. Jonathan nodded his head in what he hoped was a reassuring way, and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling in front of him. Hopefully she would get his meaning. He had already faced away from the vampire as long as he dared though, and turned back toward the darkened room before he could tell if Erina had gotten the message or not. He doubled down on his ripple breathing, the sound of his own sharp exhalations obscuring anything else from behind him.

“Perhaps you seek to flatter me,” Musgrave replied, “and perhaps I ought to be flattered indeed. Were our meeting under different circumstances, I might bring you into my crew of the damned. I’ve been quite missing academic discussion since I became what I am now. Unfortunately, I know I cannot lay a hand on you directly. Now, you shall all-”

Jonathan bent his knees and leaped. Years of rugby experience took over, guiding each muscle in perfectly coordinated motion as he shot himself up through the air, spinning his torso around as he rose to face the spot where he knew Musgrave must be hanging. The clatter of his lamp falling to the stone floor beneath him barely registered, but the wild flicker of moving light threw the outline of the man, hanging upside down like a bat from the ceiling, into relief. Jonathan couldn’t see Professor Musgrave’s face in any detail, but he didn’t have to, or even really want to. He just needed to confirm the vampire’s position, and to see that he was indeed lighting the fuse of the dynamite in his hand. As the lamp spun over and the ceiling was once again buried in darkness, Jonathan felt the impact as the paper-lined cylinder knocked into his chest, leaving a trail of bright sparks as Musgrave threw it before he could take Jonathan’s exact movement into account. Then, Jonathan was falling on his back toward the flagstones below, holding the cylinder in one hand and pinching the fuse to choke out its flame in the other. The searing agony in his fingertips was buried by the tingle of ripple healing, and then drowned out by the sharp impact as he hit the floor.

“WHAT?!”

“Shine your light up, Miss!” Speedwagon’s shriek followed immediately on the heels of Musgrave’s exclamation, “let me get a shot at the bastard, and I’ll burn ‘im to ashes just like last time!”

Jonathan was too dizzy, and too blinded by the electrical tingling and crushing pain in his skull and ribs, to see if Erina caught on to Speedwagon’s bluff in time to play along. He did, however, hear a desperate scrabbling from overhead, and feel a rain of stone dust bounce off of the skin of his face as Musgrave dashed across the ceiling away from the staircase.

“The cage!” Speedwagon shouted as Jonathan picked himself up off the floor, balancing his body’s need for oxygen against its need for ripple as he managed his breathing. “He’s going for the cage!”

Jonathan lurched to his feet and reached for the bars. If he could just get himself in the way again, put a ripple-charged body between the creature that he still couldn’t quite believe was Professor Matthew Musgrave of Oxford University and his captives, perhaps he could force the vampire out of the tower room and corner him somewhere safer. As his fingers closed around the rusty iron bars, the light of Erina’s lamp pointed back in his direction, showing him the bars and the gasping, blankly staring throng behind them.

Speedwagon saw something else though, and began to scream out a warning, but it was already too late. As Jonathan craned his head upward to look for Musgrave, he felt a sensation like steely sharp teeth closing around his fingers and pinching their skin so taut it felt about to rip. As he gasped in shock and pain, two glowing yellow eyes filled his vision as Musgrave glared down at him from where bars met ceiling. Another wave of unreality swept over Jonathan as he saw his opponent’s face for the first time.

Professor Musgrave’s first treatises had been published around the middle of the century, before Jonathan was even born. The last Jonathan had heard, he had mostly retired from teaching at Oxford and came back only to deliver the occasional seminar, spending most of his time up north pursuing his Elizabethan research at his own, slowing pace. The face that glared down at him, aside from the burning golden eyes and bared crystalline fangs that marred it, was that of a man scarcely older than Jonathan. His hair was a sleek reddish brown in the lamplight, as were his trim beard and moustache. His pale, freckled face was without a wrinkle.

Jonathan remembered what Lamkin had said, about her having had grown up children despite looking no older than this herself.

He tried to raise his hands to strike the revenant with his ripple-charged fingertips, but he found, with a horrified drop in his stomach, that he could not remove them from the bars that felt like they were cutting into his flesh. It was then that he noticed Musgrave’s hands, unwrinkled, unmarked, and uncalloused despite his decades of excavation and note-writing, wrapped around the upper bars. Where the vampire’s skin touched the iron, a thick coat of frost had appeared, spiderwebbing its fractal patterns down along the bars toward Jonathan’s own hands.

“Clever,” the glowering, impossibly young face growled through its mouthful of batlike fangs, “but one cannot defy the devil with mere cunning. I tried myself, before he relieved me of my will to resist.”

Shutting out the pain in his frozen hands, Jonathan kept his ripple breathing going. He wasn’t sure if Musgrave knew that he’d be vulnerable if he stopped, but he wasn’t about to take that chance. Over the background noise of Speedwagon’s frantic shouting, Erina’s loud, sharp ripple-to-waves breathing, and the throbbing pain of his stuck and frozen hands, Jonathan forced himself to focus on Musgrave’s words, and to reply.

“You keep talking about the devil. What happened to you, Professor Musgrave? How did you fall to…this?”

The young, blazing-eyed face was nearly still save for the mouth as Musgrave hung in place and replied. “I always did love Windknight’s Lot. I came here every summer, when my spine didn’t prevent it. To speak truthfully, I was afraid my digging days were behind me for good before he invited himself into my home.”

The yellow light dulled, slightly, and Jonathan thought he saw Musgrave shift in place in the half-darkness.

“I came downstairs to find Roberta, my wife, dead in his arms. He left…almost nothing. I used to love her, before he cured me of love. I threw myself upon him, but he placed his mark upon my head and-”

Suddenly there was a wet hissing sound, and Jonathan felt hot, damp steam run up in a little cloud around his face. He and Musgrave both dropped their jaws, and turned their heads to the bars a couple of feet away from Jonathan. Speedwagon had pulled off his shirt and half-ruined jacket, and was pressing his lithe and more than slightly hairy pectoral muscles against the barricade. He was too busy breathing in deeply and out sharply to speak, but not too busy to wink at Jonathan and flash him an open-mouthed grin as the ice receded across the bars.

Jonathan tried to move his hands. His fingers didn’t obey him perfectly, but he felt them wriggle painfully against the bars, and then pull away from them with a sharp ripping sensation, followed by the soothing tingle of ripple healing.

“WHAT IN THE-”

Jonathan didn’t let Musgrave finish his sentence. He bent his knees, lowered his still half-frozen hands to his sides, and leaped upward, driving his head straight into the ghostly visage out of time. How much ripple would the thin skin of his forehead, separated from his heart and lungs by so much bone and brain tissue, be able to carry? Jonathan had no idea. More likely than not, he realized even as he leaped, Musgrave’s claw would catch his head and tear through it like an overripe fruit without the vampire suffering more than a minor burn for it. However, Jonathan’s head struck neither claw nor skin; Musgrave let out a terrified, whistling shriek completely unlike his measured and cultured speaking voice, and threw himself across the room, leaving a waterfall of dust and broken masonry chips scattering down from the ceiling as he kicked off of it before Jonathan could headbutt him. He landed, both knees bent, on the floor at the edge of Erina’s lamplight, and an instant later broke the balcony doors open with an ear-splitting crack that put even his screaming whistle to shame. Outside, the snow had stopped falling, and a few distant stars had shown themselves in a gap in the clouds. In their pale blue-white light, Jonathan saw Musgrave’s black silhouette rush out onto the crumbling balcony, and then throw itself over the battlements.

“After him!” Speedwagon roared, turning away from the steaming, moisture-laden bars and waving his hat wildly at the balcony. “He’s go…ack!” Overtaxed as they were from their ripple breathing, Speedwagon’s lungs gave out then and left him doubled over in a fit of hacking coughs. Inside the cell, two dozen or more faces stared in open mouthed and wide eyed confusion as their owners pressed back away as best they could. The girl who looked like a taller, more feminine, and much angrier Poco turned away from the coughing Speedwagon and glared urgently at Jonathan. “Well, listen to him you big oaf! Go kill the prick!”

Jonathan opened his mouth to answer, but quickly decided that action would speak better for itself at the moment. He saw Erina advancing toward Speedwagon, extending her free hand toward his bare skin, and Poco running toward the prison and babbling excitedly. He turned back toward the balcony, raised his still thawing hands in front of him, and ran out into the winter air to where Musgrave had leaped off the edge.

He peered his head downward, straining his eyes to see into the darkness below. If only he hadn’t dropped his lamp before, this would have been so much easier. What enabled Jonathan to find what he was looking for wasn’t the sight of the vampire himself, but rather the sound of howling wind and the image of flying clouds of snow and stone dust that not even the late night darkness could hide. There, in a clear patch of snow amid the bushes, he now saw the hulking shape that could only be Wamuu rushing forward, driving the roiling cloud of wind and debris ahead of him as he chased something Jonathan couldn’t see. A moment later, his eyes found the smaller shadow tearing through the leafless shrubs ahead of him, streaking toward the mist-covered lake.

Jonathan looked right and then left for something to throw, but realized that was foolishness even before he’d done it. The fugitive was far too distant to strike with any accuracy, even if he could find a weapon that could retain a ripple charge for so long away from his body. Not to mention that he wasn’t sure he even could pick up and throw anything yet, with his hands still healing and thawing themselves. Could his ripple healing allow him to jump down after Musgrave and survive? Perhaps, but he wasn’t ready to gamble his life on it. As he thought, Erina and Speedwagon appeared at his sides, looking out in the same direction as himself.

“Think he’s planning to hide underwater?” Speedwagon asked, his voice still hoarse and breathless.

“I hope so,” Jonathan said, eyes still following the figure as he thought back to the nightman’s fishing expedition in Brighton, “I doubt he can outswim Wamuu. Or see better than him underwater.”

“Wait,” Erina said, sounding a bit breathless herself, “no, I don’t think that’s what he’s doing at all!” She reached out her slim arm and pointed at the edge of the lake, where Musgrave was now racing across the last stretch of snow at the shore. It indeed did not appear as if he were crouching down to jump or dive into the steaming water. It was getting harder and harder to tell as the distance increased, but it appeared as if he was running forward like there was nothing but solid ground ahead of him.

Jonathan realized what he was about to do just before Musgrave’s first step on the surface of the lake, which froze solid beneath his foot. The steam withdrew half a dozen yards all around him, and he continued running across the spreading, gleaming ice. Wamuu, who had been gaining on him, slowed to a crawl as his massive feet crunched into the frozen edge and sank into the water below; the ice was thick enough to bear Musgrave’s weight, it seemed, but not Wamuu’s. Another wind vortex tore through the steam around Musgrave, but it only made him stagger, not fall. He was already further away from Wamuu than Jonathan had ever seen him use his winds, and it seemed the nightman’s headdress could only project its full force for so far.

“Think he can swim under him?” Speedwagon asked.

“I don’t know.” Jonathan shook his head. “He can swim fast, but as fast as Musgrave can run? I don’t know that he can control the wind from underwater either.”

“The wind’s blowing toward them,” Erina said, suddenly. Indeed, the mist over the lake was still billowing away from them and toward the village on the far shore, and the swaying of the leafless tree branches pointed likewise.

“Yes it is,” Jonathan said, “what do you have in mind?”

Erina was already rebuilding her ripple charge, and pulling out her umbrella.

…​

Wamuu heard Jonathan’s call echoing over the valley. Breaking his way another step out through the ice and bringing the water level up to his waist, he took his eyes off of his quarry and looked back. There, on the tower balcony, Jonathan was shouting, and pointing. Following his finger brought Wamuu’s eyes to a shadow gliding through the air overhead, down from the balcony and out toward himself, high above his head. He mistook it for an immense seed-pod at first, floating on a leafy wing. A fraction of a heartbeat later, however, he realized what he was looking at.

I told the daywoman her spirit dwarfed her body. Perhaps I should have told her it dwarfed Jonathan’s body as well.

He didn’t know precisely what they had in mind, but Wamuu had spent enough time among the Sendo monks of the northern Indus over the ages to have some idea. And, as luck would have it, he had already dealt with the crow that served as Musgrave’s scout and aerial striker.

He sloshed on through the thin, weak ice up to his chest, keeping the winds pulling as strongly at Musgrave’s legs as they could at this distance. Then, when Erina flew overhead, so low now he could hear the sound of her deadly breathing, he withdrew the gale and pushed it up behind and beneath her. He heard her breath stutter for just a beat as the wind caught her weapon, raising her up again and rushing her forward, helping her gain on the mask-slave. Then, with a silent plea for fate to have decided in Erina’s favor, he ducked down and swam forward under the ice, holding his breath and propelling himself as fast as he could.

Above the steaming water, he saw the light-distorted image of Erina descend, her bare feet landing on the surface well ahead of Musgrave’s spreading ice. He saw the ripples shoot outward across the water from the soles of each foot and the underside of each toe, felt his flesh crawl in aversion at the deadly power being radiated down into the lake ahead of him. He forgot the name the monks had invented for it – the strengthening of surface tension as it conducted the Sunfather’s burning hand – but he had known Erina was skilled in it from the moment he saw her use that gliding instrument to break his gale in their first meeting.

She stayed in place, holding the water tight, unbroken, and charged with living death beneath her. Closer to himself, Musgrave stopped. His ice ceased to advance. Was he staring at her in confusion? Gawking in superstitious terror? Considering parlay? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he stopped long enough for Wamuu to close the distance and crush the ice under his feet with his fists. The mask-slave’s frenzied splashing grew wilder still when Wamuu grabbed his sinking legs and tore them out of their sockets. Two heartbeats later, his skull had crunched together between Wamuu’s hands, staining the water around him a foul, inky black that he knew would soon clear away.



TO BE CONTINUED ->